Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala 9780691225302, 0691058814, 0691058822

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INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS AND THEIR CRITICS

INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS AND THEIR CRITICS PAN-MAYA ACTIVISM IN GUATEMALA

Kay B. Warren

P R I N C E T O N

U N I V E R S I T Y

P R E S S

Copyright © 1998 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warren, Kay B. Indigenous movements and their critics : Pan-Maya activism in Guatemala / Kay B. Warren, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-05881-4 (cl : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-691-05882-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Mayas—Guatemala—Government relations. 2. Indians of Central America—Guatemala—Government relations. 3. Mayas—Guatemala—Ethnic identity. 4. Mayas—GuatemalaPolitics and government. 5. Guatemala—Politics and government—1985I. Title. F1465.3.G6W37 1998 972.81'004974152—DC21 98-3531 This book has been composed in Times Roman The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). http ://pup .princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10

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To the variety of paths to lasting peace in Guatemala

Contents Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

Transcription of Maya Languages and Personal Names

xxi

Introduction. Democracy, Marginality, and Ethnic Resurgence

3

One. Pan-Mayanism and Its Critics on Left and Right

33

Two. Coalitions and the Peace Process

52

Three. In Dialogue: Maya Skeptics and One Anthropologist

69

Four. Civil War: Enemies Without and Within

86

Five. Narrating Survival through Eyewitness Testimony

113

Six. Interrogating Official History

132

Seven. Finding Oneself in a Sixteenth-century Chronicle of Conquest

148

Eight. "Each Mind Is a World": Person, Authority, and Community

163

Nine. Indigenous Activism across Generations

177

Conclusions. Tracing the "Invisible Thread of Ethnicity"

194

Appendix One, Summary of the Accord on Identity and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

211

Appendix Two, Questions from the 1989 Maya Workshop Directed to Foreign Linguists

215

Glossary. Acronyms, Organizations, and Cultural Terms

217

Notes

221

Bibliography

251

Index

281

Preface in the late 1980s as a reexamination of identity politics and racism twenty years after my original fieldwork in Guatemala. Right away, I knew this would not be a restudy in any classical sense because ethnic politics, Guatemala, "Indian" communities, cultural anthropology, and Kay Warren had changed so dramatically since my first trip in 1969. Analytically, there was no constant frame of reference.1 On the ground, I really had no choice. The atmosphere of uncertainty and violence that stemmed from the 1978-1985 civil war between the army and guerrilla forces still permeated everyday life in Guatemala and in San Andres Semetabaj, an agrarian community in the western highland department of Solola, which had been the focus of my earlier work. Moreover, self-proclaimed pan-community Maya groups were springing up throughout the country. Maya academics and activists confronted Western scholars with pointed critiques of politics, research practices, and published findings on Maya culture. One could hardly use the old rationale—the strategic innocence—that anthropology meant speaking out for those who had no voice. The public intellectuals in Pan-Mayanism and I share several threads of a transcultural history dating from the time of that first field research. At that point, nascent San Andres activists in their early twenties (as I was) were just beginning to rebel quietly against their families. Their siblings were young children and toddlers. I knew the families of some of these restless youths, even their grandparents, and wrote about the insights and the frustrating impasse their parents had reached politically because indigenous activism was locally and religiously focused (Warren 1989). I would never have guessed that, along with successful careers in rural development and education, some of these questioning youths would become more, rather than less, active in indigenous cultural politics or that one toddler would become a nationally known linguist specializing in Maya languages. Given the localized arenas for intellectuals in marginalized indigenous communities, it did not occur to me that one day we would routinely share the podium at national and international conferences. San Andres was not the only site of restlessness in the early 1970s. Four hours away by bus, in the colonial city of Antigua, young foreigners converged on a fledgling research center, the Francisco Marroquin Linguistics Project (PLFM), where I volunteered on weekends in 1970 and 1971 to return something to the country I was studying.2 The aspirations and contradictions of the project reflected the political subjectivity of my generation of activists. We were inspired and limited by the idealism of the 1960s, the call THIS BOOK BEGAN

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for volunteers by President Kennedy and Pope John XXIII, the civil rights movement, and the tragedy of Vietnam. Bob Gersony, a driven, self-educated Vietnam vet; Jo Froman, a midwestern philosophy B.A. studying Kaqchikel as part of her Peace Corps training; Tony Jackson, an Oxford-trained British volunteer; and Terry Kaufman, a well-known American research linguist—took over the center from a pair of tired American priests, who had run a language program for missionaries and used Mayas as passive informants for their studies. Soon thereafter three rounds of Peace Corps volunteers with M.A. or Ph.D. degrees in linguistics joined the rejuvenated project as instructors—this time to offer professional training to Mayas.3 Given the counterinsurgency climate of the time—the military was focusing on the containment of urban guerrillas through army check points on major roads, curfews, and the suspension of civil rights such as the freedom of assembly—the institution had no choice but to present itself as nonpolitical. Guatemalans in power generally regarded the field of linguistics, especially research on unwritten "native tongues," as a peripheral enterprise with no political significance. For its own part, the Linguistics Project aspired to be an integrator across rural communities and language divides and a conduit of ideas for national policy. Rejecting the social hierarchies conventional to development assistance, the foreigners worked to create a novel institution "to vigorously promote the study and use of Indian languages in communication, education, and community development" (Froman et al. 1978, 103). Instead of intervening directly in communities, as was the norm for Peace Corps volunteers and missionaries, they decided to train Indians in skills not available in Guatemala and to encourage participants to make their own decisions about community projects. Through intensive course work, the students gained M.A.-level training from Terry Kaufman, Nora England, Will Norman, and others4 and applied their lessons by producing studies and educational materials based on language practices in their home communities. After classes, the trainees, who came from all over the highlands (though not at that time from San Andres), exchanged experiences and ideas among themselves in an environment highly sympathetic to indigenous issues.5 The result was an extraordinarily wide construction of linguistics as a scholarly and activist field of knowledge. The Mayas recruited for the project were not the indigenous professionals with secondary educations and professional degrees who had begun to form their own associations in the early 1970s. These emerging elites were felt to be highly antagonistic toward foreigners, too mobile and urban-oriented for community-focused work, and disdainful of those with less education. Nor were families with successful rural businesses in towns such as Tecpan or Totonicapan interested because the wages offered did not compete with what their children could generate in family enterprises.6 Rather, the project re-

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cruited locally nominated Mayas between the ages of twenty and thirty-five with strong social ties with their home communities and no more than six years of education.7 Apparently there was no pressure from the trainees to incorporate women and no early feminists among the foreign staff to press for their involvement. Later, when attempts were made to widen recruitment, the project encountered reticence from rural parents and husbands who did not want young women to live away from home. In a country where most of the indigenous population worked as illiterate peasant agriculturalists, the goal was to build a self-governing institution through which Indians could produce bilingual dictionaries and collections of readings and take an active role in decisions regarding the use and future of the Maya languages spoken in their communities. Through three rounds of courses during the first six years, 138 full-time students were trained in Maya linguistics and a talented core group—including Narciso Cojti and Martin Chacach, who later became national leaders—received on-the-job administrative training. The founders created an inspired solution to the problem of generating funds for a Maya organization while avoiding dependence on institutions that might compromise the project's goals. They established a Spanish school for tourists, students, and international development volunteers, staffed by a nonindigenous administration and teachers.8 Although the two wings of the project were administratively insulated from each other, the founders enjoyed the ironic inversion of the conventional division of labor at a time when Ladinos rarely worked for Mayas. By 1976 the Spanish school employed 120 instructors in three Guatemalan cities; by 1978 it had taught five thousand students.9 The gringo volunteers planned to leave a fully functional institution in Maya hands after five years, which they accomplished on schedule in January 1976. Over the last twenty-seven years, hundreds of Mayas have spent time training and later working as linguists and administrators at the project, studying with professional linguists in subsequent programs and research centers, and, more recently, taking and teaching university courses. Language issues have stood at the heart of the Maya movement and its political vision. The Linguistics Project, which stopped training new linguists in 1990 (Chacach 1997), never escaped the stigma of its initial association with foreigners. Other institutes, frequently with alumni from the project, gained prominence with the surge of Pan-Maya institution building in the late 1980s. Not surprisingly, linguistics was not the only route to Pan-Mayanism, though it is striking how many current activists have backgrounds in the field. Pan-Maya oral histories, however, rarely dwell on the Francisco Marroquin Linguistics Project.10 Rather they root the political fascination with language in Adrian Chavez's (1969) battle in 1945 to promote a specialized

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orthography (or alphabet) for K'ichee' and his founding of the Academy for the Maya-Kiche Language in 1960. Mayanists cite these events as evidence of early indigenous attempts to wrest control over language and representation from the government and North American evangelizers. Control (whether it be by well-meaning foreign idealists, government indigenous institutes, or missionaries) and the ranking of languages, cultures, and ethnicities (accepted as a transparent fact by many Guatemalans) have been continuing preoccupations of the Maya movement. Many regard 1987 as the watershed, when Mayanists took control for the first time of the national framing of indigenous language policy with the creation of the governmentsponsored Academy for Maya Languages of Guatemala (ALMG) (Lopez Raquec 1989; England 1996). To better understand the transformations of the last thirty years—and the choices chroniclers make as they marshall the authority of their own experiences to narrate important transitions—I made repeated trips to Guatemala from 1989 through 1998, participated in international and national forums with Maya scholars, and began to publish essays dealing with different facets of Maya social criticism and ethnic revitalization. Yet, a larger project remained: to interrelate the convergent and divergent strands of cultural resurgence in rural communities and in the national movement for reivindicacion. The Spanish term expresses the wide-ranging demands for vindication, recognition, recovery, and rights as indigenous peoples. This study draws on and expands the scope of my recent work on Maya definitions of self-determination in a world often, but not always, hostile to their efforts. As the title of this book indicates, indigenous movements do not come in the singular nor do they have unitary politics. Rather they are heterogeneous products of diverse antecedents—local, international, national—even as they attempt to forge unifying political programs. The book also deals with the movement's critics—foreign and domestic, indigenous and nonindigenous—who see tactical mistakes, threats to their own achievements, or even danger in the movement's phrasing of cultural politics. The challenge for anthropology is to trace the interplay and impact of these critical voices without silencing the movement, speaking for its proponents, or romanticizing its politics. Throughout the book, this inquiry examines the political stakes of those who author and circulate the contested representations of Pan-Mayanism. At various points, I subject the terms of my own investigation to the same questioning. Over and over again, the experience of writing this book convinced me there is simply no neutral position or language of analysis through which to author the story of ethnic resurgence. Finding an authorial subject position has involved uncovering the key moments—some of them not so noble—that capture the process through which I came to this awareness and the rhetorical strategies I use in this volume to convey these and

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other research findings to my readers. I remain convinced that one can produce a reflexive account without losing track of the demanding project of studying the cultural politics that inform the extraordinary transition in Guatemala from counterinsurgency warfare to unfinished democratic peace. Given the controversial issues raised in this study of ethnic politics, readers may find themselves buffeted by antagonistic political positions on many consequential issues and troubled by ethnic organizing in the name of multiculturalism. As an anthropologist, I have found this to be a particularly difficult historical moment to write about ethnic revival because of the turbulence of ideas and events that surround identity politics in the United States and beyond. I have been astonished by the hostility provoked by my research on Pan-Mayanism. At an international conference in Princeton in 1995, the problem was not so much how I was approaching the issue, whether my framing was useful or not, but that I was studying it at all. In particular, I was condemned by a pair of senior American academics, a historian and a political scientist, for writing about this example of ethnic intensification as if it were constructive. In the heat of the moment, one critic accused the discipline of anthropology of being in the business of lending legitimacy to cultural difference and, thereby, contributing to the global crisis of ethnic violence. Although the charge is absurd—the discipline commands neither the power nor the uncritical agenda imputed to us here—one of the purposes of this book is to understand and respond to these and other critics in terms of this instance of ethnic organizing. As we know, Americans are highly ambivalent about race- and ethnicbased politics and cultural pluralism at home. A growing backlash has been mobilized to challenge multiculturalism and multilingualism in the schools, disestablish affirmative action, and dismantle the welfare state's minority programming. The militia movement became a lightning rod for the expression of racial anger. In California, the passage of Proposition 187 focused anti-immigrant hostility on the families of Mexicans and other Latin Americans working in the state. The OJ. Simpson trial and the beating of Rodney King, which set the stage for its reception, revealed a tremendous gap between white and black attitudes on the intensity of racism in daily life. Media explanations of poverty have shifted toward the moral language of individual character and the biological language of inherited IQ. The Ebonics controversy and vote to disestablish bilingual education in California public schools, the funding of public-library acquisitions in diverse immigrant languages in New York, and the state supreme court ruling that the Arizona English-only policy for government affairs is unconstitutional illustrate the intricate politicization of language and cultural difference. Internationally, the situation appears even more charged. Anti-immigrant politics and violence have spread across European democracies. Throughout the world, ethnic mobilization and nationalist movements have been cast as a

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primary source of post-Cold War violent conflict. Groups that articulate their demands in ethnic terms are seen as dupes of cynical leaders seeking political power at any price. Because political demands for self-administration sometimes become territorial—calling for the subdivision of states and the collective mobilization of nationalist groups dispersed across different countries—distinctive situations of ethnic nationalism are lumped together as threats to the stability of existing nation-states. Epithets like "Balkanization" and "separatism" have been used by UN officials and academics to condemn politicized groups in multi-ethnic states. Like all writers in politically charged circumstances, I hope for an engaged, proactive readership that will savor the story of an intricate struggle to build peace in an ethnically heterogeneous neighboring country—one intimately connected to the United States yet culturally distinctive in many ways. That I can see no distanced neutral position from which to consume this work means that it will be read in many ways.13 In part this is the consequence of thick description ethnography, which rejects the voice-ofGod expository style in favor of demonstrating the flux and multiplicity of viewpoints that make a difference in shaping social conflicts. In reality, there is no single route through the dilemmas of the moment. Of course, I hope this study will rectify some basic misunderstandings for all—that, rather than being members of a dead culture, Mayas are as involved in the politics of the 1990s as any other activist group and that, once seen as peers, intellectuals in other societies have much to teach American academics and students about engagement in nationally important issues.

Acknowledgments THERE ARE MANY individuals in Guatemala to whom I am indebted for time, insights, meals, a roof over my head, key questions, and the cultural histories this book recounts. None of them is responsible for my interpretations, interconnections, or final analysis although all offered contributions, large and small, accompanied by important analytical insights. Other collaborators shared ideas through research networks—anchored momentarily in Guatemala, Delhi, Campinas, Utrecht, Portrack, Santa Fe, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Princeton, and New York—through which this research gained its narrative form, to be tested later in lectures and seminars at Princeton, Brandeis, Harvard, Michigan, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and the Institute for Advanced Study. The reviewers of the manuscript for publication—Charles Hale, John Watanabe, Joanne Rappaport, Les Field, Michael Kearney, and R. McKenna Brown—offered enthusiastic evaluations followed by generous and challenging intellectual engagement with the work as a whole. Other colleagues—especially June Nash, Judith Maxwell, Vincanne Adams, Diane Nelson, Abigail Adams, Richard Adams, and Carlos Ivan Degregori—offered insightful feedback on important aspects of the analysis. This is a better book for the critiques and urgings of my fellow Latin Americanists. In San Andres, a rural county (or municipio) of sixty-five hundred inhabitants in the western highland department of Solola, I returned to the extended family networks I had known years before and learned the sorrowful news that some venerated elders, such as Don Emiliano Matzar, had died long ago. I began to catch up on regional history. Alfonso Ixim and Antonia Jab introduced me to the many people who coursed through their busy household seeking advice on how to organize cooperatives, cope with the legal requisites of bureaucratic transactions, resolve simmering family disputes, retell town history for class assignments, and seek protection for loved ones through Maya ceremonies. Alfonso also found time to talk about his changing vision of Maya culture and share drafts of his new writing project. Dona Maria Tul and Don Luis Ixim drew me into their kitchen to catch up on town affairs and, quite unexpectedly, to hear of the positive repercussions for their family of my first fieldwork in the early 1970s. Their adult sons, No'j and Javier—small children when I saw them last—now questioned my presence as a foreigner, one becoming a good friend and the other an evasive skeptic. Don Gustavo Ixim and I spent thoroughly enjoyable hours, as we had in the past, under a metal roof in the hammering rain, talking through the din about history, philosophy, politics, culture, language, and religion. More recently,

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Alfonso, No'j, and Don Gustavo reviewed translated drafts of my San Andres analysis, and we began a joint essay on the tremendous changes the town has experienced over the last half-century. In San Andres the social arrangements that in the past had been so central to public affairs—the dominance of local Ladinos (non-indigenous Guatemalans) in politics and plantation agriculture, despite the fact they made up only a quarter of the town's population, and the importance of the Maya hierarchy of religious and governing authorities to indigenous sociality—had been displaced by other organizations and events after the mid-1970s. The 1976 earthquake flattened the town. In a few moments, the impressive colonial church with its beautiful high dome and adobe walls, freshly restored after decades of saving and work, lay in ruins. Homes, businesses, and the municipal center had to be rebuilt. Two years later, the nationwide counterinsurgency war overwhelmed local politics and forced Maya organizations elsewhere, such as the Francisco Marroquin Linguistics Project, to disband until the worst of the violence subsided in the mid-1980s. Subsequent generations of Maya leaders worked alongside, but not always with, the community elders who had been central to resisting earlier structures of ethnic domination. On my return it was good to see community groups such as Catholic Action still striving, as they have since the 1950s, to promote public service. The colonial church had been abandoned for a safer, newly constructed building above town. As in the past, I followed countywide celebrations at Holy Week and the November festival in honor of the patron saint. The activities of young people, Maya officials, and local branches of national organizations were choreographed in familiar ways, often, though, with changes in political significance. At nightfall, the unpredictable rupture of army sweeps—heavily armed soldiers in camouflage with blackened faces who appeared from nowhere—made it clear that menacing state surveillance continued as an aspect of everyday life. Through festivals, soccer matches, funerals, a vicious dog bite, the flu, and visits to the seminary and convent (both new to me), the public elementary school, the cooperative, and Catholic Action's still-expanding church, I became reacquainted with the town. During my most recent trips, the teachers, administrators, and students at Kikotem, the newly inaugurated Maya school, welcomed me into their classrooms. My thanks to the many people who took time to chat and let me join their activities. Inevitably, my revisit took me to a variety of urban centers (Guatemala City, Antigua, Chimaltenango, and Quetzaltenango), back to Maya organizations and old friends I had known years before, and on to new institutions. Seemingly overnight, Mayanists began to publish their own commentaries and studies for wider publics. I am grateful to the national Mayanist leadership for sharing their social analyses and thoughts on cultural revitalization. I

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learned a great deal from these intellectuals, who combine a passion for scholarship with a commitment to activism. I also had the pleasure of working with non-Mayas who contribute to these organizations. During subsequent trips, my research moved on to unexpected issues to deal with the breadth and intensity of Maya activism: linguistics, history, education, literature, the media, state politics, and the international development community. What began as a story of one community's struggle to survive and rebuild after tidal waves of national violence became an account of national and community movements urging cultural resurgence. Perhaps inevitably, the project became so large that I have had to leave most of my discussion of Maya schools and women's leadership—but not gender—for another volume. Over the years, Guatemalan public intellectuals have collaborated with their North American counterparts to organize joint panels for international meetings and encourage others to bring together researchers working on cultural issues. Demetrio Cojti, Martin Chacach, Victor Montejo, Enrique Sam Colop, Irma Otzoy, and Marta Elena Casaus Arzu have been especially generous transnational colleagues at conferences in Guatemala and the United States and during visits to lecture and give seminars at Princeton University. As protagonists in the following chapters, their feedback on my research has been invaluable. Otilia Lux de Coti, Geronimo Camposeco, Margarita Lopez Raquec, Narciso Cojti, Guillermina Herrera, Carol Smith, Edward Fischer (and many others named elsewhere in the acknowledgments) have enhanced these transnational exchanges with their participation. It has been stimulating to be included and a pleasure to work with these scholars on research related to the book. In Guatemala I have visited many Pan-Mayanist organizations and workplaces and followed members of the PLFM, CEDIM, SPEM, COMG, COCADI, Cholsamaj, OKMA, PRONEBI, ALMG, CECMA, Rutzijol, U.S.AID, UNICEF, the Ministry of Education, the Institute of Linguistics at Rafael Landivar University, and PRONADE as they changed offices, set up regional projects in other locales, organized conferences, participated in peace commissions, and contributed to panels on education, linguistics, and Maya Studies. In addition to those already named, I am especially grateful to Demetrio Rodriguez, Arnulfo Simon, Ernestina Reyes, Leopoldo Tzian, Jose Serech, German Curruchiche, Elsa Son, Gaspar Pedro Gonzales, Estuardo Zapeta, Miguel Angel Velasco Bitzol, Ruperto Montejo, Celso Chaclan, and Akux Calf, among many others, for sustained discussions and background on the current movement. In Antigua and Austin, Nora England (Ixkem), Waykan (Jose Gonzalo Benito Perez), Pakal B'alam (Jose Obispo Rodriguez Guajan), Lolmay (Pedro Oscar Garcia Matzar), Nik'te' (Maria Juliana Sis Iboy), Ajpub' (Pablo Garcia Ixmata), Saqijix (Candelaria Dominga Lopez Ixcoy), Kab'la-

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juj Tijax (Martin Chacach), and Judith Maxwell (Ixq'anil) provided feedback on my emerging analyses and helped me understand the outlines of Maya linguistics, chronicles, and the complexities of language revitalization across the twenty-one Maya languages. Like many scholars, I benefitted from the multifunctional Center for Regional Investigations of Mesoamerica (CIRMA) and am thankful to several generations of the staff and to the generosity of Christopher Lutz who has made this unique multicultural research center possible. I enjoyed stimulating conversations in Antigua, Guatemala City, and beyond with Tani Adams, Marcie Mersky, Katherine Langan, Christa Siebold-Little, Todd LittleSiebold, Brenda Rosenbaum, Liliana Goldin, Linda Asturias, Clara Arenas, Matilde Gonzalez, Antonella Fabri, Anna Blume, Paola Ferrario, Susan Clay, Tracy Ehlers, Linda Green, Victor Perrera, Jim Handy, Susanne Jonas, John Ruthrauff, and Roger Plant. Helen Rivas, Elaine Elliot, and Flavia Ramirez helped me collect hard-to-find materials on Maya Studies and San Andres history. Through SMART-Antigua, Margarita Asensio and Guisela Asensio facilitated the publication permissions for key illustrations. The late Linda Schele's workshops on Maya glyphs brought us together for remarkable exchanges of experiences. Few of these collaborators will be surprised to hear that the proceeds of this book will go to a variety of educational projects in Guatemala and the United States. Colleagues at other universities and research centers, including Jean Jackson, David Maybury-Lewis, Michael Herzfeld, Arthur Kleinman, Jennifer Schirmer, Chris Tennant, Marilyn Moors, Jane Collier, Junji Koizumi, Arturo Escobar, Sonia Alvarez, Fred Myers, Faye Ginsburg, Tom Abercrombie, Mary Louise Pratt, Al Stepan, Val Daniel, Katherine Verdery, Lynn Stephen, Veena Das, Jean Lave, Dorothy Holland, Liisa Malkki, Steven Gregory, Vanessa Schwartz, Quetzil Castaneda, and the late Libbet Crandon were important sources of encouragement and feedback. At Princeton University, Jim Boon, Larry Rosen, Gananath Obeyesekere, Rena Lederman, Hildred Geertz, Begofia Aretxaga, Jeff Himpele, Stephen Jackson, Michael Hanchard, Davida Wood, Darini Rajasingham, Yael Navaro, Wende Marshall, Rosann Fitzpatrick, Ranjini Obeyesekere, Toni Morrison, Natalie Davis, Henry Bienen, Arcadio Diaz, Miguel Centeno, Richard Falk, Jennifer Hochschild, Jeff Herbst, John Waterbury, and Wolfgang Danspeckgruber were formative and inspiring colleagues. I am particularly grateful for their responses to the early stages of this study. Carol Zanca kept the Anthropology Department on course throughout my tenure as chair and helped me balance research, teaching, and administration. At the Institute for Advanced Study, where a lively and challenging interdisciplinary atmosphere inspired the final framing of the study, my thanks go to Clifford Geertz, Michael Walzer, Joan Scott, Albert Hirschman, and my postdoctoral colleagues at the School of Social Science. Our discussions re-

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affirmed my conviction that the best way to tell this history was through open-ended ethnographic essays that embrace an interactive style, concerned with indigenous genres and mine, to catch the uncertainty of Guatemala's political transition and Maya constructions of the self. My gratitude for the financial support of this research and writing goes to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, Liechtenstein Research Project on Self-Determination, Princeton Program in Latin American Studies, and the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fund at Princeton. At Princeton University Press, I am thankful to Mary Murrell, Madeleine Adams, Jan Lilly, Molan Chun Goldstein, and Lys Ann Shore, who saw the manuscript through production. Megan Peterson designed the illustrations. Gail Vielbig, Hilary Berger, and Wren Fournier were expert proofreaders. Gillett Griffin, Sonia Baur, Justin Kerr, Susanne Jonas, Beatriz Manz, and friends in San Andres and OKMA helped track down photographs to round out my visual essay. Finally, special appreciation goes to my family, most especially to Loy Carrington, who helped stretch early sabbatical salaries the whole year and, when she had the opportunity to visit Guatemala, told entrancing stories across language barriers in San Andres and carried firewood through the streets of Antigua for the joy of evening fires. She has always made home and office places of mutual learning, collaboration, and inclusion.

Portions of the following essays have been reprinted in this volume with the publishers' permission. In framing the sustained argument for this analysis, however, I have felt free to rework these materials, to let the volume as a whole take new theoretical turns and address different literatures, and to update earlier work as the movement and the peace process unfolded. "Transforming Memories and Histories: The Meanings of Ethnic Resurgence for Mayan Indians." In Americas: New Interpretive Essays, ed. Alfred Stepan (New York: Oxford University Press, Annenberg Foundation, and WGBH-Boston, 1992), 189-219. "Interpreting la Violencia in Guatemala: Shapes of Kaqchikel Resistance and Silence." In The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations, ed. Kay B. Warren (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 2 5 56. "Each Mind Is a World: Dilemmas of Feeling and Intention in a Kaqchikel Maya Community." In Other Intentions: Culture and the Attribution of Inner States, ed. Lawrence Rosen (Seattle: University of Washington Press and School of American Research, 1995), 47-67.

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"Reading History as Resistance: Mayan Public Intellectuals in Guatemala." In Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, ed. Edward Fischer and R. McKenna Brown (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 89-106. "Narrating Cultural Resurgence: Genre and Self-Representation for PanMayan Writers." In Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social, ed. Deborah Reed-Danahay (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 21-45. "Indigenous Movements as a Challenge to a Unified Social Movements Paradigm for Guatemala." In Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements, ed. Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 165-95. "Enduring Tensions and Changing Identities: Mayan Family Struggles in Guatemala." In History in Person; Enduring Struggles and the Practice of Identity, ed. Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave (Santa Fe: School of American Research, forthcoming).

Transcription of Maya Languages and Personal Names

IT IS CONVENTIONAL in academic books to note the wide variety of current practices for representing specific languages whose written forms are not standardized. Most authors decide to simplify diversity by introducing their version of a unified orthography for the ease of readers. By contrast, I have decided not to introduce artificial uniformity into a situation where alphabets are in fact political codes, guided by a history of intense controversy over ethnic politics and education. In Guatemala minor written differences—for instance, Quiche, Kiche, and K'ichee' for the Maya language spoken by over a million people or Popol Vuh, Pop Vuj, and Poopool Wuuj for the sacred text often called the Maya bible—mark major philosophical and ideological cleavages. (As will become clear, the precise number of Maya languages and dialects is also politicized.) My practice is to use the form current with the group or individual in question—increasingly this is the official Academy for Maya Languages of Guatemala (ALMG) orthography (which itself is subject to refinement)— and to explain the controversies as appropriate. For Guatemalan readers, my use of these orthographies, which will continue to change and converge, marks this study from its inception as a product of a very particular moment in history. Personal names are also changing as individuals involved in revitalization switch situationally to Maya names, often derived from ancient calendrics and chronicles, to complement their Spanish given names. There are also conventional Maya counterparts to Spanish first names in many communities. The names used in revitalization circles—where Raxche', Nik'te', and Ixkem displace Demetrio, Maria Juliana, and Nora—may or may not be known in one's home community. My practice follows the form individuals use for themselves in a given context. Many Mayanists use a single name in work groups or use their Maya and hispanic names together in publications, practices I also adopt. In the past I was caught in the dilemma of using pseudonyms, and thus not being able to recognize fully the Maya contribution to my work, or using real names in an environment that remained politically uncertain. Mayas were also caught in these dilemmas. By 1997 the national movement had become public and very high profile, which allows me to identify individual protagonists. Nevertheless, it continues to be appropriate to use pseudonyms to protect the privacy of local leaders in San Andres.

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For geographical names, I have retained the usage found on national maps. This, too, may change as under the peace accords some communities move to readopt the preinvasion pronunciation of hispanicized place names and others switch from colonial saints names to the earlier Maya names of their communities.

INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS AND THEIR CRITICS

Introduction Democracy, Marginality, and Ethnic Resurgence The Mayanist movement is at once predominantly conservative on the cultural plane and predominantly innovative and revolutionary on the political and economic plane. For that reason, it is said that the Maya movement's path leads not only to Tikal (traditionalism) but also to New York and Tokyo (modernism). Demetrio Cojti Cuxil (1997a, 78)

THIS BOOK PORTRAYS the ways in which Maya public intellectuals, as cultural nationalists and agents of globalization, have pursued projects for "selfdetermination" in Guatemala's climate of chronic political uncertainty. Doubtlessly, what has changed most since 1989 is the awareness among Maya activists that, as members of regional, national, and international networks, they can and need to advance their arguments for change in a range of overlapping arenas. In James Scott's terminology (1990), making public the "hidden transcripts" of resistance to the status quo has transformed the movement and pressured the wider society to respond to Guatemala's indigenous population in novel ways. The following chapters highlight the work of national and local intellectuals, who since the 1980s have authored key publications, engaged in educational activities in large areas of the country, and created many new institutions. The Maya movement for cultural resurgence, which came into public view in Guatemala in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is the realization of their activities.1 This study is based on ten months of extensive discussions with movement participants in urban centers and small agrarian communities, many of whom I have known since the early 1970s. In addition, I attended a variety of meetings, workshops, and conferences from 1989 through 1998. The book examines the politics of Maya understandings of multiculturalism and Guatemalan racism and the politics of social scientific readings of this movement. As an anthropologist with a grounding in interpretive and political anthropology, my approach examines the social construction of Pan-Maya politics and demonstrates the way elements of Maya culture (and many other cul-

4

INTRODUCTION

tural hybrids) inform that construction and are transformed in the process. The movimiento may a, as it is called, raises a series of important questions: What are the enduring contributions and limitations of a social movement that has pursued scholarly and educational routes to social change and nation building, in contrast to the mass mobilizations of the popular Left (or the troubled Zapatista rebellion in neighboring Chiapas)? What are the paradoxes and politics of the movement's "reverse orientalism," which categorically elevates the "self and condemns the structurally dominant "other" as racist to promote solidarity and resistance? How do issues ideologically marginalized in this pan-ethnic movement—such as gender, class, religious diversity, diaspora, and the distinctiveness of local community—reassert themselves in the practice of the movement? These issues call for a consideration of the political contexts—Guatemala's historically weak civilian government, strong military, and highly successful grassroots Left—in which the movement has developed its vision of a multicultural state. The analysis touches on the ways in which nine years of on-again, off-again peace negotiations—which involved the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) guerrilla coalition, the government, the military, and United Nations mediators—generated an opportunity from 1992 to 1996 for renewed discussions between the Maya movement and other politicized groups in the country. Quite unexpectedly, the peace process brought about a striking transformation in the terms of debate for indigenous issues in national politics. Most recently, Pan-Mayanism has experienced the contradictory pressures of international funders who in the name of neoliberalism pressure the government to trim bureaucracies and social services and in the name of peace offer very specific kinds of support for the strengthening of civil society and democracy. Social theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau argue that the urgent political work for this historical moment is the quest for "radical and plural democracy." They advocate diverse routes for individuals to pressure democracies for wider social, economic, and environmental justice. In the view of many analysts, this is a post-Marxist project, "given a profound crisis in socialism as a Utopian horizon for a series of anticapitalist traditions, in Marxism as a doctrinal basis of support, and in the very idea of revolution as the founding act of a new society" (Renique 1995, 178).2 The dramatic collapse of state socialism and the apparent exhaustion of its appeal in much of the world painfully confirm the limits of ideologies that construct a political subject focused uniquely on the politics of class conflict.3 Yet these theorists would not free democracy from criticism, given liberal capitalism's crisis seen in the growing gap between the rich and poor and the persistence of systems of "rights [that] have been constituted on the very exclusion or subordination of rights" of others (Mouffe 1993, 70). The proliferation of social movements and backlash organizing in many countries

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signals the growing politicization of economic and jural tensions and reveals the multiplicity of concerns and identities salient to individuals in their daily lives. Theorist Alberto Melucci (1989) sees a distinctive role for progressive movements in mass society because they operate outside conventional politics and create "submerged networks" that surface to focus public attention on nodal points of contention over social policy. Lacking the resources of larger formal institutions and political parties, many social movements specialize in symbolic challenges to the status quo that offer alternative interpretations of individual and collective experience. Their impact may be farther reaching than one would expect as they provoke reactions that render power visible and thus negotiable in unanticipated ways: By exaggerating or pushing to the limit the dominant discourse of power, the movements expose the self-contradictory nature of its "rationality" or, conversely, they show that what is labeled as "irrational" by the dominant apparatus is perhaps dramatically true. (Melucci 1989, 76) For movements that seek to mobilize around indigenous identity in Latin America, the goal is to expose the contradictions inherent in political systems that embrace democratic egalitarianism yet, by promulgating monoethnic, monocultural, and monolingual images of the modern nation, epistemically exclude major sectors of their populations. The political mainstream has often cast radical assimilation as the logical way to resolve the "ethno-national" problem and insure national unity. To understand the distinctive subjectivity of political minorities, however, the ethno-national question must be seen . . . as containing a plurality of meanings that cannot be reduced to a single case. It contains ethnic identity, which is a weapon of revenge against centuries of discrimination and new forms of exploitation; it serves as an instrument for applying pressures in the political market; and it is a response to needs for personal and collective identity in highly complex societies. (Melucci 1989, 90) Interestingly, while making analytical room for ethnic mobilizing in a wider celebration of working-class, ecological, and feminist movements, Melucci remains ambivalent about the practice of ethnic politics. In this he is not alone. At the center of many observers' reservations about ethnic mobilizing are two expressed fears: that calls for self-determination inexorably lead to the destructive breakup of existing states and that ethnic violence is the sign of our times. Global preoccupations with self-determination intensified at the close of World War I and set the stage in colonial and postcolonial situations for the awkward balancing in the United Nations of state sovereignty with the right of "a people" to "freely determine their political status and freely

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INTRODUCTION

pursue their economic, social and cultural development" (Resolution 1514, I960).4 The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples used this language to reaffirm the territorial rather than ethnic character of self-determination in post-World War II decolonization. The goal was to protect the territorial integrity and stability of new states in world regions, such as Africa, where European colonizers had frequently partitioned colonies without regard to the geographical distribution of indigenous inhabitants. Between 1948 and 1976, the process of decolonization resulted in the recognition of eighty new states and shifting political concerns at the United Nations. The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s brought a new wave of stateshattering separatist political movements and the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Clearly the normative assertions of international law were destined to be overtaken by the realities of fast-moving international politics. As Richard Falk observes, The right of self-determination has matured along three distinct, often overlapping, and sometimes uneven and confusing paths; those of morality, of politics, and of law. Indeed, the incorporation of self-determination into international law has consistently lagged behind advocacy based on aspiration and consideration of justice (the moral debate) and political movements and their results (the political experience). (1997, 51) It is not by accident that indigenous groups5 have remained at the margins of official debates over self-determination. Richard Falk argues that United Nations member states are particularly threatened by this new category of several thousand potential claimants residing in countries throughout the world. Furthermore, the geographic distribution of indigenous groups does not conform to the colonial units that were the archetypal candidates for decolonization in international law. He concludes that the international order has tactically overreacted to indigenous movements' use of the language of selfdetermination despite the fact that "it is widely appreciated that the goal of such claimants is "autonomy' in an economically, politically, and culturally meaningful form, rather than an effort to be a separate state in the international sense" (1997, 49). In their quest for leverage and recognition, indigenous peoples as collective nonstate entities have asserted their claims in the language of state power, self-determination, and decolonization—even though they do not correspond to the United Nations state-centric paradigm for protagonists. A turning point occurred in 1971, when the United Nations decided that indigenous issues represented more than the domestic politics of member states and, thus, were the rightful provenance of international deliberation. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, international groups worked to articulate a

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7

new agenda of legal norms in spite of the fact that indigenous groups had no direct power in the realm of international affairs (Wilmer 1993).6 Efforts were begun to reformulate the 1957 International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 107 Concerning the Protection and Integration of Indigenous and Other Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations in Independent Countries. Instead of paternalistically advocating conventional models of economic development, integration, and the assimilation of indigenous peoples into national life, the new document supported a paradigm of strengthening indigenous cultural rights, languages, schools, and autonomy in development priorities. Indigenous groups in the Americas considered the final product of these deliberations, ILO Convention 169 of 1989, as a breakthrough for their claims of greater autonomy in national affairs, though it would be years before states such as Guatemala affirmed the convention. In a parallel effort, the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples was convened in 1982 to begin discussions of what was to become the Draft Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Organizations with United Nations consultative status, indigenous groups from throughout the world, and observers from member states contributed to these deliberations. The draft declaration, first issued in 1989 and amplified in 1990, has raised international consciousness at the same time as it has met serious opposition from member states. In brief, it advocates the rights of indigenous groups to develop their own ethnic and cultural characteristics; to protect their cultural practices and ceremonial, historical, and archaeological sites; to practice their own spiritual traditions; to promote their own languages; to name themselves and their communities; to have a voice in legal and administrative proceedings with the assistance of interpreters if necessary; to control their own schools; to have access to the mass media; to gain recognition of their customary laws and land tenure systems; to receive restitution or compensation for lands that have been usurped; to enact a wide range of environmental protections; to actively participate in their own social and economic improvement with state support; to have autonomy in internal and local affairs including the ability to collect taxes; to gain direct representation in the political affairs of the state; and to exercise autonomy in international and local affairs. Along with many other indigenous groups, Mayas have been involved in the process of articulating these issues at UN conferences. A variety of organizations and alliances have turned to press for these concerns in Guatemala. Indigenous movements have urged constitutional reforms to expand their recognition, rights, and autonomy at home. Although there has been growing international concern with minority rights, the application of substate selfdetermination to cultural minorities has been hotly debated since the 1960s. As Halperin and Scheffer (1992, 47) observe:

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INTRODUCTION

The full exercise of self-determination can lead to a number of outcomes, ranging from minority rights protection, to cultural or political autonomy, to independent statehood. The principle of self-determination is best viewed as entitling a people to choose its political allegiance, to influence the political order under which it lives, and to preserve its cultural, ethnic, historical, or territorial identity. Often, though not always, these objectives can be achieved with less than full independence. For governments that seek to limit claimants within their borders and ethnic groups that seek cultural rights including regional self-administration, at issue is who merits legal recognition as "a people" rather than as "a population" that lacks the legal status to advance these claims. As other indigenous groups in the Americas, Pan-Maya activists in Guatemala point to the 1989 version of the International Labor Organization's convention for the protection of indigenous rights as the basis for their legitimacy as rights-bearing collectivities, given their historical, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual bonds. The word Pan-Mayas use for themselves in national and international forums is the Maya pueblo, meaning the Maya people, nation, community. In the early 1990s, the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and the European Commission for Democracy through Law (a consultative body of the Council of Europe) were active in articulating the legitimacy of minority rights within democratic pluralism, including the right to develop cultural identities, seek schooling in minority languages, and widen minority participation in public affairs. Maya activists have been frequent visitors to European forums on cultural rights and often marshall European policies to support their own case for national reform.7 Thus, transnational United Nations working groups, European rights commissions, and activist nongovernmental organizations have become key participants in generating legal discourse, political leverage, and financial support for indigenous movements in the Americas. Unlike other parts of the world, Latin America is often deemed fortunate because its conflicts have not generated collective ethnic violence as in Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Central Africa, South Asia, and Indonesia. Demographically, 90 percent of the indigenous population in the Americas—which totals approximately 36 million people—live in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. While Mexico has the largest number of indigenous citizens, more than 10.5 million, they represent only 12.4 percent of the national population. In the United States, the indigenous population of 2 million citizens makes up 0.8 percent of the national population. By contrast, there are indigenous majorities in Guatemala, where 5.4 million indigenous citizens make up 60.3 percent of the

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population, and in Bolivia, where 5 million indigenous citizens make up 71.2 percent of the population (Yashar 1996, 92). As late as 1988, political scientists such as Crawford Young concluded that New World indigenous groups were too fragmented, assimilated, and marginalized to press for wider political goals. Jorge Castafieda's 1993 Latin American history of the Left's transformation from insurgency to reformist politics after the Cold War, published on the eve of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico and the year before peace accords focused on indigenous rights in Guatemala, did not anticipate that room needed to be made at the bargaining table for indigenous activists in the rebuilding of their nations.8 Recent indigenous-rights movements, which have sprung up throughout the Americas from Hawaii and Canada to Chile and Brazil, demonstrate the limits of these judgments.9 Indigenous groups point to incidents of ethnic violence; make political claims for reforms concerning land, schools, and legal systems in the language of universal rights; and work to "revitalize" and to "modernize" their cultures. They reject conventional ethnic divisions of labor that have been used historically to naturalize their poverty. National constitutions have been rewritten and in several instances rural regions have won important measures of autonomy.10 Political scientist Deborah Yashar asks a key question: "What are the conditions under which strong ethnic identities are compatible with, and supportive of, democracy?" (1996, 87). She argues that the current moment of politicized resurgence in the Americas is tied to the democratic opening that occurred in many Latin American states in the 1980s and 1990s and was accompanied by neoliberal economic reforms that endangered many rural communities' subsistence (Yashar 1996; forthcoming). As authoritarian governments were pushed by international organizations to liberalize their regimes, hold elections, and honor basic civil rights, indigenous groups emerged publicly to press for concerns that had no legal channel in the repressive years before. As we will see, Yashar's state-focused explanation fits the contemporary Guatemalan case very well and, furthermore, raises the important issue of which state-formulated policies generate ethnic responses and how governments attempt to channel identity politics for their own ends. The top-down model, however, begs the issue of the multiple sources of social agendas in indigenous Guatemala and the cultural and organizational controversies through which early activists, despite the fact their actions were not deemed "political" by the state or "movements" by others, built social forms that crossed several generations of local activists before taking their current Pan-Maya form. Critics11 of indigenous movements in Latin America question the validity of these politics by arguing there is no clear demarcation between indigenous populations and the mestizo mainstream.12 In many cases, there is no

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INTRODUCTION

transcendent concept of an indigenous people but rather many micro-ethnicities and community identifications. That indigenous individuals and communities shed localized identities situationally or permanently, that much purportedly indigenous culture is Hispanic, and that nonindigenous society sometimes appropriates indigenous rituals and aesthetics provide further evidence of culture flows and hybridity. Any attempt to argue in overarching terms is deemed artificial both for indigenous and nonindigenous populations. For very different reasons, both the Left and the Right in Guatemala have sought to deconstruct and destabilize the ethnic argument. Situating Pan-Mayanism in the context of Guatemala's political transition, the history of ethnic formations and politics, and in a range of distinctive frameworks for analysis—particularly the literatures on rights, revitalization, the invention of culture, ethnic nationalism, social movements, and anthropologies of the state13—are cross-cutting themes in these essays.

Maya Activists and the Movement Pan-Mayanism does not represent an ivory-tower enterprise, given that virtually all activists come from rural backgrounds. The movement rejects Guatemala's melting pot ideology, which has compelled indigenous people "to pass" as nonindigenous Ladinos if they seek employment outside their home communities or pursue education and economic mobility. An ethnic formation in which passing becomes possible, if not coerced along certain social frontiers, is in part the legacy of the early Spanish colonial order, which in the sixteenth century generated a hybrid category of Spanish-speaking Indians, called Ladinos, who contrasted most sharply with those of European backgrounds, the Spaniards and their New World offspring, the Creoles. Though the content of this category was variable in time and space, most colonial Ladinos were Hispanicized indigenous people living outside their communities, or people of mixed parentage, that is, mestizos. For a while, particular kinds of mestizos were defined by an elaborate colonial system of castas, but the resulting categories imploded as ever finer distinctions were advocated for different proportions of indigenous, Spanish, and African blood. In contrast to other areas of Latin America, by the eighteenth century, the term Ladino displaced mestizo in Guatemala, and both Ladinos and indigenous populations remained impoverished and politically marginalized in the colonial social order (Lutz 1982, C. Smith 1990b). Revisionist histories, such as Carol Smith's insightful hypothesis (1990b), argue that the distinction between Ladino and indigenous groups became polarized and rigidified so that Ladino came to signify /26>/i-indigenous in culture and descent late in the nineteenth century.14 The liberal government of Creole elite Justo Rufino Barrios (1871-85) created an export economy

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based on the cultivation of coffee on large plantations. To harness indigenous workers for the labor-intensive harvest, the Barrios regime promoted the resettlement of Ladinos into the western highlands, where indigenous communities predominated. They were introduced as a structurally privileged class of labor recruiters, money lenders, liquor merchants, and state officials who represented the economic interests of the Creole elites who controlled national politics and economics. Thus, it was through a process of state intervention that the Ladino-indigenous contrast took on its characteristic contemporary form as a mutually exclusive and hierarchical class-like distinction and the Creole elite came to transcend everyday ethnic politics (C. Smith 1990b, 84-87). The actors in Guatemala's current social formation interweave and contest images of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference in a variety of ways. Pan-Mayanism challenges the legacy of colonial and nineteenth-century state formations, which repeatedly used forced-labor policies that associated indigenas with heavy manual labor and small rural communities while conferring advantages on Creoles, mestizos, and Ladinos based on their fluency in the national language and culture. The twentieth-century image of Guatemala as a Spanish-speaking Ladino country, proud of its cosmopolitan Latin American culture, becomes another historical construction the movement seeks to interrogate. Ironically, Pan-Mayanism is composed primarily of individuals for whom ethnic passing into the dominant mainstream to escape invidious racism and discrimination would be feasible, given that they are educated, fluent in Spanish, and economically mobile. Rather than becoming urban Ladinos— an open possibility in this hierarchical ethnic formation and one that many recent bicultural migrants have pursued—activists have turned to the difficult project of promoting the resurgence of "Maya culture." Who are the activists in this movement? What is their agenda? How do they see their political goals in a world that is highly ambivalent about ethnic mobilization and in a political system in which they are widely criticized? With its particular blend of conservatism and radicalism, how does the Maya movement destabilize the Right/Left polarities of Guatemalan politics and perhaps lead us as American readers to reimagine very different political situations closer to home? In discussing Pan-Mayanism here, I have sometimes found myself struggling not to succumb to a portrayal of "Maya culture" as a static pre-Columbian essence; that is, treating the impressive persistence of preconquest knowledge and practices as "real" Maya culture and the rest as a distant colonial imposition or a recent extemporaneous add-on. Rather, this book attempts to do justice to the various syntheses of Maya culture, elements of which have long and short histories, and their appropriation and recombination by local communities, religious confessions, social movements, and

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INTRODUCTION

political groups in opposition to a variety of others. The following chapters explore ways to write about the rolling distinctiveness that is Maya—the continued practice of embracing and rejecting all sorts of intersecting ideas and identities—in a multicultural world and state. The history of anthropological approaches to Maya culture is deep and distinguished. Mesoamerican Studies, whose scholars have chosen more often to focus on the Yucatan and Chiapas, in Mexico, rather than on Guatemala, offers different kinds of inspiration. Evon Z. Vogt (1969), Nancy Farriss (1984), and Victoria Bricker (1981) have pursued striking continuities in the deep structures of Maya worldview and belief despite or, better put, to spite colonialism. William Hanks (1997) sees sixteenth-century Spanish colonial resettlement and missionization policies as subtly but fundamentally reconfiguring Maya language and culture and, thus, creating a paradigm shift to colonially inflected cultural distinctiveness. Quetzil Castaneda (1996) shows how the archaeological invention of an essentialized Maya civilization in the twentieth century through the foreign reconstruction of sites such as Chichen Itza in the Yucatan has been appropriated in myriad ways by anthropologists, tourists, local entrepreneurs, and Maya intellectuals. Gary Gossen (1994) and June Nash (1995) are struck by the reemergence of indigenous identity and cultural themes with great historical depth in rural communities and the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. There is a cumulative argument here for multiple, often conflicting sources of Maya culture. The goal of this analysis is not to document an invariant culture—though notable elements of the current mix have long histories—or to count only those elements we imagine as separate from the colonial process as "real" (read authentic) Maya culture. (If culture takes on the attributes of "property" that belongs uniquely to a group, then European colonialism has inevitably led to clouded titles.) Rather, in my view, Maya culture represents the meaningful selective mix of practices and knowledge, drawn on and resynthesized at this historical juncture by groups who see indigenous identity as highly salient to self-representation and as a vehicle for political change. Their assertions are actively challenged by other groups. Through the process of public debate and private meeting, the significance of being Maya has altered in important ways. The Maya movement currently works to promote the revitalization of Maya culture for the 60 percent of the national population that they count as indigenous in background.15 Even at the lower "official" 1994 census number of 43 percent, there are 3.6 million Mayas out of a national population of 8.3 million inhabitants. One-third of the country's departments (primarily in the northwestern highlands) have indigenous majorities that range from 60.5 percent to 97.2 percent; one-third have roughly balanced numbers of indigenous and nonindigenous inhabitants; and one-third (primarily in the southeastern sections of the country) have nonindigenous majorities of 66.4 percent to 99.2 percent (Cojti Cuxil 1997a: 29-30). According to R. Adams

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(1997), the twentieth century has witnessed a consolidation of stronger indigenous majorities in regions where their numbers are already high. (See figures 1 and 2 to compare Maya language regions versus the administrative regions of the country.) Given the resemblance of local culture in communities throughout the western highlands, the movement is attempting to cultivate common cause across the twenty-some historically related Maya language groups in the country.16 The largest four language communities (K'ichee', Mam, Kaqchikel, and Q'eqchii') number between 350,000 and 1 million speakers each and comprise almost 80 percent of the Maya-speaking population (see figure 3 for language demographics). Vital to the image of unity is the Maya language tree, generated by historical linguists and widely circulated in movement publications to demonstrate that diverse languages in the present are legacies of a common past (see figure 4). Mayanists hope that the ideology of "unity within diversity" will bring Mayas powerfully into the mainstream to readdress Guatemala's serious development dilemmas.17 They propose a multicultural (pluricultural) model for participatory democracy. This model recognizes multiple national cultures rather than the overarching Hispanic standard for nationalism that predominates in Latin America. This mandate defines collective cultural, linguistic, and political rights for Maya citizens and legitimizes their claims for cultural and political space in the country's educational, judicial, and administrative systems (COMG 1991; Cojti Cuxil 1994; 1995; 1996a). This political vision works within an idealized paradigm of regionalized language diversity, although Mayanists are well aware of the importance of more localized identities for many indigenous people and the many internal diasporas, ancient and modern, that complicate regionalization. That the regional language map is at odds with the national administrative division of Guatemala into departments has many ramifications for both parties. That, despite their regionalization, languages are not neatly territorial in everyday life raises important issues for Pan-Maya identity construction and language revitalization. In the highlands, their speakers are geographically mobile, bilingual across Maya languages, and/or across Spanish and indigenous languages, or for some youths monolingual in Spanish. A set of interrelated theses guides this analysis. First, the movement's emphasis on self-determination (autodeterminacion) is part of a historically constituted language for agency that needs to be studied in the context of transnational institutions and Maya histories of social criticism, community formation, and international involvement. The language itself and the stress on constituting oneself as "a people" are the products of the elaboration of rights discourse through organizations such as the United Nations, which finds itself caught in a field of competing interests, given its role as the international custodian of state sovereignty. Second, this analysis argues that the particular cultural forms and social

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INTRODUCTION

SOURCES: N. Cojtf (1988), England and Elliot (1990), and England (1996) FIGURE ONE. MAYA LANGUAGE MAP OF GUATEMALA

In Guatemala, the maps on these two pages are at war with each other. Mayanists use the language map to assert that language diversity and indigenous idendty a e re-

g.onal issues -The state

STSJT T T :

insists o n

^

(departament

^

rf

which

^

e

J ^

^ r e language divides, and co n!

P e r P e t U a t e M a y a P0HtiCal fra

r

adminf

8 m e n t a tion and localized dia-

Vari US StrategieS f r r e C O n d l i n the m

°

°

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t1 1 g t refused to consider representations of the nation tha set a framework for regionalized self-administration.

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MEXICO

ATLANTIC

^

^

EL SALVADOR

PACIFIC OCEAN FIGURE TWO. POLITICAL-ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS OF THE COUNTRY

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Language Demographics

Language

Number of Speakers

K'ichee'

1,000,000

Mam

687,000

Kaqchikel

405,000

Q'eqchii' Q'anjob'al Tz'utujiil Ixhil Ch'orti' Poqomchii' Popti' (Jakalteko) Poqomaab' Chuj Sakapulteko Akateko Awakateko Mopan Sipakapense Itzaj Teko

361,000 112,000 85,000 71,000 52,000 50,000 32,000 32,000 29,000 21,000 20,000 16,000 5,000 3,000 3,000 2,500

Uspanteko

2,000

Departments Solola, Totonicapan, Quetzaltenango, El Quiche, Baja Verapaz, Alta Verapaz, Suchitepequez, Retalhuleu. Quetzaltenango, Huehuetenango, & San Marcos Guatemala, Sacatepequez, Chimaltenango, Solola, Suchitepequez, Escuintla, & Baja Verapaz Alta Verapaz, El Peten, Izabal, El Quiche Huehuetenango Solola & Suchitepequez El Quiche Chiquimula & Zacapa Alta Verapaz, Baja Verapaz, & El Quiche Huehuetenango Guatemala, Jalapa, & Escuintla Huehuetenango El Quiche Huehuetenango Huehuetenango El Peten San Marcos El Peten Huehuetenango

El Quiche

Number of Municipios 73

56 47

14 4 7 3 5 7 6 6 3 2 4 6 2 (plus 2 in Mexico) 1

SOURCE: Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib' Maya' ChW (1993: 10-19); England (1996). FIGURE T H R E E . LANGUAGE DEMOGRAPHICS

Approximately twenty Maya languages are spoken in the country depending upon how the difference between dialects and languages is negotiated by speech communities and by linguists. Language communities vary from over a million to a few thousand. The leadership of the Maya movement has been drawn primarily from Kaqchikel and K'ichee' speakers who come from communities closer to urban centers and continuing educational opportunities than do other groups. However, many national Mayanist organizations—from the Academy for Maya Languages of Guatemala (ALMG) to Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib' (OKMA)—self-consciously seek representation of as many language communities as possible in their organizations.

Historical Development of Mayan Languages Division

Rama

Idioma

1 Wasteka

Proto-

2 Yukateko

\ Occidental

3 Tzeltal Mayor

\

4 Q'anjob'al Mayor

Waste ko Chikomuselteko Yukateko

Ch'ol

Chuj

1 2

Yukateko (Maya') Lakantun

3 4

Itzaj Mopan

5 6 7

Ch'orti' Ch'olti' Ch'ol Chontal

8 9

Tzotzil Tzeltal

, , - - - - - 10 Tojolab'al 11 Chuj 12 Q'anjob'al 13 Akateko 14 Popti' (Jakalteko) 15 Mocho' 16 Muchu'

Oriental

5 Mam

17 Mam 18 Teko 19 Awakateko 20 Ixhil 21 Q'eqchii' 22 Uspanteko 23 24 25 26 27 28

Sipakapense Sakapulteko Achi K'ichee' Kaqchikel Tz'utujiil

29 Poqomaab'

SOURCE: England and Elliot (1990) FIGURE FOUR. MAYA LANGUAGE TREE FOR MESOAMERICA

Mayanists use this genealogical tree, based on reconstructions by historical linguists, to represent the common linguistic and cultural origins 4,000 years ago of the diverse current indigenous linguistic communities in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Themes of cultural continuity and diversity within unity are hallmarks of the movement which proposes a transcendent level of Maya identification to unify the struggle against racism, cultural and political marginalization, and poverty.

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INTRODUCTION

relationships through which Mayas assert their cultural claims are integral aspects of self-determination. This book illustrates the genres, media, forums, and social organizations through which Pan-Mayanism has developed its concept of identity politics. Third, ironically but not unexpectedly in this world of diasporas, the production of cultural distinctiveness through the movement's interdisciplinary field of Maya Studies involves important instances of transnational appropriation, blurring, and polyculturalism. The flow of culture across borders becomes apparent when one traces the production and practice of Maya history, linguistics, education, and collective rights.18 This analysis illustrates these appropriations as they are forged into a language of ethnic distinctiveness. Culture, history, politics, and academic research combine to make the Maya movement a related yet different process from ethnic nationalism and multiculturalism elsewhere in the world. Given these concerns, it is important to trace the internal debates and evolving language of the movement, the politics of its production of knowledge, and the ways social relations mediate participation instead of attributing the dynamics of the movement solely to the material interests of its leaders. Clearly power takes both cultural and material forms in the movement. How and why are these intellectuals authenticating certain visions of Maya culture and discrediting others? What novel resources are they making available to potential participants? This analysis argues that Maya struggles for self-determination may be muted if they are viewed solely in terms of universalizing schemes, whether they be the language of minority cultural rights or the historical materialist language of oppression and class conflict.19 So it is crucial to follow the movement in practice, to trace the circulation and consumption of ideas and, just as importantly, to understand the ways local populations adopt or resist the rethinking of indigenous identity. It would be inaccurate to dismiss this cultural revival as parochial, primordial, or detrimental to modern politics. Mayas are highly aware of global identity politics, even more so since the surge of indigenous organizing in the Americas and Rigoberta Menchu's award of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Peace (Menchu and Comite de Unidad Campesina 1992; 1993). As the chapters on public intellectuals and Maya Studies demonstrate, Mayanists bring to the international process of ethnic intensification their own experiences, ideologies, dreams of socioeconomic mobility, and evolving politics.

Self-Definition and the Other At the onset of the analysis, it is important to confront the politicized irony of a non-Maya talking about Maya self-determination. Recent scholarship from a number of academic fields has questioned the disinterested position

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of the social scientist. Subaltern studies has examined the history of European representations of the "other" and has shown that the imagery of civilized versus barbarian became an integral aspect of the Western colonizing project.20 African-American, feminist, Latino/a, and lesbian and gay scholars have confronted researchers and policymakers who assume the powers of objective science yet in their studies of contemporary society marginalize and stigmatize nondominant viewpoints.21 In a related development, ethnic studies and postorientalist critics have questioned the agendas of anthropology and area studies to the extent that these fields focus on cultural difference when the compelling issue in other societies may be widespread disenchantment with the status quo. They also fault scholars for assuming the unity and superiority of Western culture and liberal democracy rather than examining the deep divisions and tensions within American society.22 Politicizing "who speaks for whom" is a central issue inside and outside movements that seek recognition, greater cultural autonomy, and political influence. Political essentialists commonly argue that group membership is a prerequisite for the legitimacy of the analyst's voice. Authors must physically and experientially represent the group if they are to write authoritatively of Maya, Latin American, women's, or working-class experiences. This assertion is accompanied by critiques of dominant scholarship as disempowering in practice as well as in theory. These critics argue for the decentralization of the production of knowledge in order to reveal respected canons as politically vested constructions, and for alternative readings of social reality to reveal hidden structures of power. Yet, after exposing the exclusionary character of so-called objective neutrality, anthropologists such as Renato Rosaldo (1989), literary critics such as Gayatri Spivak (1988), and activists such as Gloria Anzaldua (1990) have gone on to destabilize images of the essentialist social critic as a unitary subject. They note the multiplicity of social cleavages, identities, and crosscutting identifications imputed and practiced by all subjects—insiders and outsiders alike. If one is at all convinced by these arguments, then it is increasingly clear that knowing the world and producing knowledge involve the interplay of continually shifting positions and perspectives. This is evident even when the language of racism (or other ideologies of categorical difference such as class) creates hierarchies of discrimination that obscure other powerful threads of identification, loyalty, and enmity, such as gender or religion. As James Clifford (1988) and Donna Haraway (1989) assert, shedding the image of the unitary critic and protagonist calls for an airing of the ways in which all research is situated and partial. The challenge becomes including the analyst within the framing of that which is to be researched. Questioning the politics of "who speaks for whom" will always be impor-

20

INTRODUCTION

tant for insiders and outsiders alike. It raises the issue of representation in both senses: who claims the authority to craft representations of ongoing social and political realities and who gains the position to represent others in public affairs? But an intersubjective question also needs to be posed: "who speaks with whom"; that is, how do individuals and groups selectively engage and influence each other, often across politicized cleavages? In forging the Maya movement, activists have developed shifting and provocative answers to both questions. Current dialogues—sometimes affirming and other times discordant—involve Maya, U.S., European, and Latin American writers and activists working on a range of academic, anticolonial, indigenous, and class-inflected projects. This book discusses Maya social critiques and their appropriations of voices these intellectuals label the "other." Kaxlan (pronounced kashLAN; originally used in Mesoamerica by indigenous people to distinguish Castilian-speakers and now often extended in practice to "foreigners" or "outsiders")23 is a term Mayanists employ for the "other." The K'ichee' term—which has been adopted by Mayanists across language groups (and displaces words like the Kaqchikel mo's)—often carries a pejorative tone. Its prime referent is the Ladino, the twentieth-century "outsider" and hated racist within national society. In everyday affairs, the word marks "otherness" in more benign ways: the Kaqchikel word for bread is "kaxlan tortillas" (kaxlan wey). Although there is an abundant vocabulary for foreigners— gringos,24 canches (blonds), and various nationalities—kaxlan is the term with political bite in Mayanist circles. Kaxlan contrasts with a range of expressions for the indigenous "we": language-specific expressions for "our people" (qawinaq in Kaqchikel), the nationalist Mayab' or Maya' for all Mayas, and the encompassing pueblos originarios and naciones nativas del continente, terms adopted from indigenous activism elsewhere in the Americas.25 It also contrasts with the community-specific names people have for themselves—Trixanos in San Andres, for example—which for many living in the countryside continue to be the most intense axis of cultural distinction. In practice, kaxlan—not to speak of its contrast—is a highly charged but heterogeneous construction. Otherness has been situationally essentialized and diversified as Maya intellectuals engage those who have become the useful other, the ambivalent other, the racist other, or the class-movement other. This analysis traces the flow of ideas between Mayanists and diverse others as these exchanges relate to Maya quests for "autonomy" and "selfdetermination." Pan-Maya strategies involve confrontational challenges to others who would presume to speak for Mayas and a great deal of joint antiracism work with non-Mayas. At a major national forum, the annual Maya Workshop (Taller Maya), linguist Enrique Sam Colop questioned North American re-

INTRODUCTION

21

searchers' ethics and politics, noting how little research is repatriated to Maya communities and wondering about investigators' hidden motivations and political interests (Sam Colop 1990; England 1990). Skepticism drives Maya intellectuals to extend the notion kaxlan to international researchers. The term is a biting one because it merges the foreign researcher with the national racist, whether the researcher is a human-rights advocate, evangelizer, or ambitious academic. In this context, essentialist constructions are generalized to all non-Mayas: All are colonizers, the categorical "other" with interests inevitably suspect. Maya skepticism of the ethics of foreign researchers coexists with their recognition of the utility of foreign research for Maya nation building. Mayanists are interested in foreign scholarship that supports Maya revitalization and are strategic in their appropriations of Western essentialism for their own ends.26 They encourage studies that address the vitality of Maya culture and trace continuities in language, culture, and religion from pre-Columbian times to the present (COCADI 1989). Maya resistance to domination and Ladino racism are other high-priority projects. Their own research agendas include continuity and resistance along with special emphasis on discrimination in education, academic research, national history, the media, and the tourism industry. Mayanists are quick to discard anthropological scholarship when it portrays the hegemony of Ladino culture as inevitable. In repatriating foreign scholarship of Maya culture, they have selectively promoted the translation of classical ethnographies for portrayals of Maya rituals of great antiquity that were the center of community life until recently (La Farge and Byers 1997). The appropriation of foreign scholarship—the movement of signs across space and systems of meaning, as Gupta and Ferguson would put it (1992)—is being used by Mayas to reject older patterns of identity-destroying assimilation. The movement seeks to break the association of Maya identity with abject poverty and Ladino oppression, and to make room for new combinations of ethnicity, work, religion, public culture, higher standards of living, and democratic political participation. International involvements have been accompanied by the mfranational intensification of ethnic difference. This is no accident. Critiques of the 1992 Columbus quincentenary brought prominent indigenous leaders and activists from the Americas together in a variety of international forums, where they discussed, both on and off the record, distinctive national struggles and ethnic nation-building.27 Community leaders in highland agrarian towns agree that the antiquincentenary campaign was a turning point in their political consciousness and demands. In Guatemala, the state continues to be a central player in the forging of ethnicities. Maya cultural intensification was incubated in the brutal repression of the military-guerrilla warfare of 1978-1985. Tens of thousands of

22

INTRODUCTION

Guatemalans were killed; hundreds of thousands were forced to flee as political refugees to the United States, Mexico, and Europe. The western highlands, where Guatemala's Maya population is concentrated, received the most punishing militarization. The war threw a spotlight on the dangers the military imputed to cultural difference and the vulnerability of Maya leaders. As the war intensified, some Mayas thought in more explicit terms of a social movement based on the revitalization of Maya culture. Members of pro-Maya groups personally experienced the repression directed toward indigenous leaders and witnessed the marginalization of Maya concerns during the civil war. The few who gained access to national universities, where they were exposed to a variety of political voices, most vocally those on the Left, kept low profiles while also writing theses that critiqued racism and envisioned a Maya-specific politics. A handful received scholarships to study in Europe or the United States. By the late 1980s, members of these different networks had reemerged into public to create a wide variety of research centers and national forums for cultural rights. The current movement has been propelled by leaders in their forties and fifties, many of whom participated in the nascent movement in their twenties, and is fueled by younger teachers, development workers, and students.

Rethinking the Role of Public Intellectuals Maya intellectuals have used a Benedict Anderson (1991) strategy—including the production of all sorts of print media supplemented with cassette tapes and videos—for building a sense of identification that transcends faceto-face community. This bicultural, multilingual effort extols literacy in a country where rural illiteracy rates are extraordinarily high. Activists write in both Spanish and Maya. They emphasize the capacity of indigenous languages to engage all spheres of contemporary life and a Whorfian sense of language as the generative source of cultural distinctiveness. That the prime movers of Pan-Mayanism are public intellectuals continues to generate controversy—in part because of their transgression of conventional ethnic hierarchies but also, I would argue, because of the ambivalence with which intellectuals are held in the West. Even if one defines public intellectuals as educated observers who craft social criticism to stimulate the public rethinking of important conflicts, it is clear that American experiences are far from universal. Russell Jacoby (1987) narrates the recent social history of public intellectuals in the United States as a reflection of very specific generational and historical circumstances that nurtured and later compromised their creativity. During the interwar years, young writers found their way to the intense countercultural circles of bohemian New York, where they developed their ideas in dialogue

INTRODUCTION

23

with each other and their readers. In his view, the post-World War II expansion of American universities crushed free thinking by offering employment security and professional status to the next generation of independent minds in exchange for conformity to specialized disciplinary power structures. As a result, wide-ranging critical voices were coopted into a comfortable professional class, judged not by wider publics but by their inward-focused academic elders. One can agree with Jacoby's provocative questioning of the intellectual and the university without joining in his lament of the death of social criticism with the transformation of free-spirited urban writing into suburban conformity. To confront the prejudices of this singular history, it would be important to appreciate the diverse American settings in which people find a public voice as producers of knowledge and as vocal audiences in communities, social movements, regional politics, and education. Some community historians are known only in their neighborhoods; others build alternative imagined communities through the print media. The prominence of local and national intellectuals—none of whom would make Jacoby's list of notables—in civil rights, ethnic, feminist, gay rights, ecological, religious, and community-based movements (and their political backlash) has been a vital part of the social history of our country since the 1960s. Many of these critics have come to challenge the mainstream from the margins; others have been recruited by contending currents of the mainstream. Some speak and write as independent or anonymous movement intellectuals, others as part of the academy where they have transformed disciplinary canons and founded controversial interdisciplinary fields. Nevertheless, Jacoby's Foucauldian insight remains: American universities demand that their junior faculty submit to a punishing six- to ten-year apprenticeship before they are eligible for the grueling "up or out" tenure decision. The current academic model, the discipline of disciplines, has not inevitably generated scholarship cut off from wider social controversy but its complex conventions certainly reward certain paths of research and discourage other routes. Nor are academics free from the pressures of the national political economy. Recently, the erosion of tenure with the growing recruitment of less expensive part-time faculty who will never qualify for job security demonstrates that the neoliberal pressures on governments to cut public spending affect the metropole as well as the "Third World." A comprehensive social history of public intellectuals in Latin America, Africa, and other post-colonial regions of world remains to be written. In focusing on the impact of the end of the Cold War on socialist intellectuals, James Petras and Morris Morley (1992) echo Jacoby's lament of the compromise of independent critical voices. They reserve special condemnation for the "retreat of the intellectuals," especially ex-Marxists who in this view have betrayed their long-standing alliance with the working-class struggle

24

INTRODUCTION

that seeks to confront capitalism and imperialism through revolutionary politics, trade unions, and student movements. In the 1970s and 1980s, the shift in Latin America from revolutionary to liberal democratic politics and from organic to institutional intellectuals resulted, in their view, from the slaughter of political activists by repressive military dictatorships and from the support by North American and European funders of research institutes with postMarxist agendas. The new research program is a familiar one: The first wave of external funding supported critique of the economic model and publicized human rights' violations of the military dictatorships. The second supported the study of new social movements, while the third bankrolled studies of the democratization process and the debt. . . . The studies of the dictatorship focused on its politically repressive feature and not on its economic and military ties to Western European and North American elites. State violence was analyzed in terms of human rights' violations, not as expressions of class domination—as part of the class struggle, as class violence. From these studies the political alternatives that emerged were posed as a conflict between liberal democracy and military dictatorship. (1992, 160) The audience for this sponsored research was not local activists and militants but rather other research institutes, foreign funders, and the international conference circuit. For Petras and Morely, the repudiation of Marxist orthodoxy by social observers has led to the mischaracterization of Latin America's transition from military dictatorships to civilian regimes as "democratization." Rather they note that this shift has often brought a reconstitution of state authoritarianism, limited arenas for democratic processes, and the intensification of class conflict and poverty.28 One response to pointed questions about the interconnection of political economy and intellectual agendas involves the ethnographic study of the ways political issues are contested in specific situations. Given anthropology's concern with multiple lines of coalition and conflict, this approach would leave open the possibility of a more heterogeneous history of public intellectuals than Petras and Morely would advocate, operating from different political positions. To what extent are issues of democratization and class conflict debated by public intellectuals and social movements? How do social critics see the application of their research to wider social struggles? How have national universities, think tanks, and foreign funders directed intellectual agendas? How have they been influenced by social movements that have diversified the significance of democratization past the classical realm of electoral politics? It is important to note that while facing similar economic pressures, American and Latin American universities play different roles in the lives of critics. In Latin America, private universities have long trained national

INTRODUCTION

25

elites, the professional classes, and powerful mainstream nationalist intellectuals. By contrast, it is not uncommon to hear students at flagship public universities express special pride in their institutions' contributions to radical critiques of the status quo. In times of crisis, students have experienced terrible repression for their advocacy. Characteristically, underfunded universities have not been able to offer more than token salaries to their professors or minimal support for undergraduate studies. At public institutions, where students attempt to arrange studies around their work schedules and growing family responsibilities, graduation rates may be as low as 5 percent.29 Even at high-status institutions, urban intellectuals cannot support themselves as university professors. Rather they typically combine part-time teaching at several institutions with research projects, writing for the press, and consulting for politically engaged think tanks and international NGOs. Relatively few have Ph.Ds. They support their families with continually shifting jobs and publish books as they complete the licenciatura, the undergraduate degree equivalent to M.A.-level studies in the United States. In countries such as Guatemala, it is common to see well-published intellectuals in their forties or fifties who have gained national prominence as political and cultural leaders and who still yearn to find the time to finish their undergraduate theses.30 Maya intellectuals have their own social history and organizational involvements in rural communities and urban forums. University trained Mayanists have followed the Latin American route of multiple jobs and wider public exposure rather than the specialized North American university career path. Despite the resulting financial and time pressures, this work pattern has allowed Maya professionals from a variety of fields—education, law, health, social work, and linguistics—the freedom to engage in transdisciplinary research, to reject the disciplinary norms and intense politics of Guatemalan universities, and to create their own discipline of Maya Studies. The effect of this distinctive pattern of professionalization on the critical posture of the Maya movement and the relation of its university-trained critics to grassroots intellectuals are major issues for this ethnographic analysis. The 1990s has been an important period for rethinking the relation of public intellectual to society. Latin Americanists and Africanists, such as Florencia Mallon (1995), Claudio Lomnitz-Adler (1992), Steven Feierman (1990), and James Ferguson (1994), have framed a striking agenda for the study of the ways public intellectuals (among other specialists) affirm and dispute power structures in their countries. Through revisionist readings of Gramsci, they have fostered a reappraisal of who counts as an intellectual and a reconsideration of the roles community and regional intellectuals play in anticolonial and nation-building movements. Local intellectuals may lack formal credentials but they are recognized communally as producers of authoritative knowledge and interpreters of so-

26

INTRODUCTION

cial reality. As anthropologist Steven Feierman (1990, 18) observes, "intellectuals are defined by their place within an ensemble of social relations" and their influence becomes apparent through their "directive, organizational, and educative" activities as elders, leaders, teachers, priests, healers, mediators, officials, and so forth. At issue are the ways individuals continually rework ideas and practices drawn from various sources to authorize "communities of shared discourse" and conventionalize the specifics of their power structures. Since community-building inevitably takes place in a world of conflicting possibilities, it is important to trace the way leaders dispute other political visions, and their alliances marginalize specific categories of people. The overarching goal of this new political anthropology is to demonstrate the dynamic way that ideas, practices, discourses, and alliances are used to shape paths of action and to constrict alternatives across important political transitions (Feierman 1990, 33, 237). Anthropologists Claudio Lomnitz-Adler (1992) and James Ferguson (1994) warn that the knowledge produced by intellectuals and development professionals most often serves the interests of regional and national elites and state hegemony—that their primary function, whether explicit or intrinsic, is to naturalize taken-for-granted social hierarchies. This approach documents the cooptation of regional intellectuals and demonstrates telling parallels between political views and elite positions in regional and national class systems. The formulation, however, leaves little room for Feierman's community-based anticolonial struggle in Tanzania or concern with the particular ideas that arise from dispersed centers of social criticism elsewhere. Nor does Ferguson's powerful analysis—which convincingly demonstrates how development discourse and the exercise of bureaucratic power have depoliticized large areas of public life in Lesotho—leave much room for social movements that attempt to repoliticize inequality, as has been the case in Guatemala. Historian Florencia Mallon contributes a particularly insightful synthesis of these approaches and their preoccupations. As meaning makers in a world of competing discourses and unequal access to knowledge and power, she sees local leaders as working to "reproduce and rearticulate memory, to connect community discourses about local identity to constantly shifting patterns of power, solidarity, and consensus" (Mallon 1995, 12). The duality of their roles is striking. Public intellectuals can take on the work of "counterhegemonic heroes" who create new possibilities in community life and press for the recognition of local struggles in wider political affairs, or they can be "enforcers" who normalize state-centric politics and prejudices in local affairs (1995, 317). In practice, one could imagine many instances in which these roles would be blurred. In Mallon's study of postcolonial Mexico, local intellectuals shaped the

INTRODUCTION

27

understanding of wider conflicts through their pivotal involvements in nineteenth-century agrarian movements that used the discourses of rights and democracy to articulate a variety of contending social visions for the nation. Despite their active role in social movements that shaped national agendas from below, politically engaged communities were left behind after the 1855 Liberal revolution as national elites and complicit local intellectuals across the political spectrum consolidated their powers and used demeaning imagery—the backward, violent Indian who lacked political judgment—to marginalize these communities as incapable of direct political participation in the wider affairs of the nation (1995, 287-324). Mallon's concern with the innovative and complicit role of intellectuals on all levels and for the emancipatory and marginalizing use of the discourses of rights and democracy raises important questions for contemporary Guatemala. If only for a moment, the peace process has opened the door to greater direct involvement of Mayas from a variety of political positions in national efforts to reimagine the state. In debate are the terms in which urban and rural worlds are included or excluded in this process of democratization. To address this issue, one must engage the widest possible range of intellectuals, from the first generation of university-trained Mayas to traditionalist consensus builders and community activists in rural communities. The present study pursues the diverse practices of Maya public intellectuals, the substance of their critiques of hierarchy, and the variety of their social positions in a political system under conflicting pressures to change and in which they have many antagonists.

Culture Makers and the Maya Movement The move away from cultures as bounded entities and fixed authenticities toward a focus on culture makers—who draw on a range of cultural forms to make new claims on memory and history—has helped anthropologists widen their understandings of contemporary ethnicity and cultural resurgence.31 Transcultural forms of political critique and collective pride have become important for local resistance in such countries as South Africa, Northern Ireland, Brazil, and the United States.32 In Guatemala, the production of cultural representations in a variety of media is used quite self-consciously by public intellectuals to support struggles for social change. As I have suggested, this is not a one-way flow of culture but an interplay of local, national, and international cultures, movements, and individual relationships. Because much of this book concerns the convergent and divergent character of this interplay, it does not make sense to begin the narrative with local communities and build linearly toward national and international "levels" of resurgence. Many events central to this inquiry are at once local,

28

INTRODUCTION

national, and international in their manifestations, repercussions, and authorship. The Maya diaspora—which has a long history but intensified during the violence of the late 1970s and 1980s—crosscuts these analytical divisions. The chapters in this book will tack back and forth between urban-centric and rural-centric views of culture, politics, and social change. My analysis resists a totalizing account of the movement in favor of an ethnographic focus on specific public intellectuals, the personal stakes of their cultural activism, and key events and texts that illustrate the movement's language of social criticism and practice of revitalization. I refer to the activities of other Pan-Maya organizations, some of them inaccessible to foreigners, and to scholarship on other regions of the country to underscore the partiality of any framing—including this one, which foregrounds Kaqchikel-Mayas—in the face of the variety of experiences of being Maya in Guatemala and beyond. Chapters one and two introduce the advocates of Pan-Mayanism, their goals, and the movement's critics. The analysis situates the movement in the contrasting politics of class-based social movements in Guatemala. Chapter one asks why the grassroots popular Left, which sees itself as a powerful umbrella movement fighting oppression, was initially so disparaging of those who identified with "cultural" struggles for social change. Indigenous reactions to the 1991 Second Continental Meeting on Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance reveal the accomplishments and unfinished business of the popular Left in the early 1990s. The analysis examines a variety of critiques of Pan-Mayanism, illustrates the appropriation of post-modernism and cultural studies by journalist Mario Roberto Morales in scathing attacks on the movement's leadership, and discusses Mayanist Demetrio Cojti Cuxil's use of the language of collective rights in reply to his critics during the peace process. Pan-Mayanism and its antagonists have been engaged in a "racism versus class conflict" debate about the persistence of unequal life chances for the country's citizens. These understandings generate distinctive priorities for social policy and distinctive images of the nation. Beyond these differences, however, there are also rising social tensions in an uncertain economy with the emergence of parallel middle classes of Maya salaried profesionales in rural towns and urban bureaucracies who compete with Ladinos for jobs. Chapter two focuses on Guatemala's peace process, which to the surprise of many provided an important opening for indigenous issues in national politics. The analysis reviews the resulting 1995 Accord on Identity and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and discusses the first round of the implementation process in 1997. The analysis pursues the theme of ethnic tensions unleashed by "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" visions of the nation and demonstrates important moments of convergence in the class-

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29

based popular and Pan-Mayanist political programs during the negotiations to end Guatemala's thirty years of militarized strife. Following chapter two, a section of photographs represents the movement in context. In a flashback, chapter three examines the highly critical face-to-face dialogues Maya intellectuals had with North American and European researchers—including the present author—in the late 1980s. Mayanists assert that, just as the disempowering structures of international research need to be displaced, so do the basic frames of reference international scholars have used for identity: "ethnicity" and "minority" politics. This chapter considers the ways Mayanists practice their strategic essentialism as a political tactic. The ethnographic analysis finds that the diverse Maya reactions to foreign scholarship reflected important differences in the backgrounds and aspirations of intellectuals in the movement. Chapters four and five discuss what was still suppressed in public discussions in 1989: memories of the terrifying experience of being caught between military and guerrilla forces during the worst of the civil war.33 Violence devastated many communities in the western highlands; in San Andres it provoked a local revitalization of earlier streams of Maya culture. Chapter four shows how, as dominant religious paradigms seemed to falter under the political and psychological pressures of the counterinsurgency war, local Maya leaders turned to traditionalist beliefs of transforming selves—which they had previously vilified and discarded—to describe the existential dilemmas of growing violence in the countryside and its corrosive impact on families and community affairs. Given widespread killings and repression, Mayanists could not safely deal with political violence in their own public writings in the early 1990s— clearly they did more in the relative safety of their own meetings. By contrast, Maya refugees writing from exile, such as Victor Montejo and his collaborators, were able to publish powerful testimonies of military massacres and explore the difficult issue of Maya complicity in state violence. Chapter five offers close readings of these testimonial narratives and argues they can be read as striking autoethnographies and ethnographies of the state. Testimonies have gained new public import with the signing of the peace accords, the archbishop's program to gather testimonies as part of the postwar healing process, and the 1997 establishment of a national truth commission. The brutal murder of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi in 1998 after his announcement of the impending release of the church's final report underscores the fragility of peace in a country unaccustomed to the free expression of criticisms of government and military repression. Chapters six and seven illustrate the Pan-Maya fascination with projects that question the authoritativeness of national histories and imagine alternative accounts. Chapter six offers a close reading of Enrique Sam Colop's social critiques, published in 1991 and distributed on the eve of the Colum-

30

INTRODUCTION

bus quincentenary through national and international channels, which sought to expose the historical roots and perniciousness of racism. Implicitly, his commentaries make important arguments about the normalization of violence in contemporary society. The analysis argues that, given the hazards of producing social commentary in Guatemala in the early 1990s, Mayanist authors created veiled political critiques in the idiom of history. They counted on the active participation of readers to see the relevance of their critiques for the current situation. The analysis examines Sam Colop's selective appropriation and reworking of insights from diverse international sources of social criticism. It also traces Sam Colop's postwar transformation into a public intellectual who as a regular columnist now debates politics in the national press. Chapter seven provides a detailed ethnography of reading by following the members of a Maya linguistics research team, Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib' (OKMA), as they participated in an informal group that studied chronicles of culture, history, and colonialism written by Mayas more than five hundred years ago at the time of the Spanish invasion. Their readings demonstrate the rich linguistic, cosmological, and hermeneutical knowledge indigenous intellectuals are able to bring to sixteenth-century chronicles. Most compelling for the Maya readers are the historical echoes in the annals of current personal and political dilemmas. In practice, their search for reflections of a distinctive pre-Columbian past still vibrant today, faces colonial ruptures and evidence of expanding Hispanic hegemony, which upset but, for them, never completely erase narratives of continuity.34 Chapters eight and nine deal with the counterpoint to Pan-Maya standardization by examining indigenous struggles from the vantage point of agrarian communities, such as San Andres. While Mayanists have been active in rural towns as educators teaching literacy in Maya languages, calendrics, and religion, these same communities have pursued their own agendas, often with other social ideologies and organizational forms. The ethnographic analysis in chapter eight illustrates the history of community intellectuals and local Maya preoccupations with effective leadership, the erosion of moral authority, and the problem of integrating alienated youths into an encompassing sense of common purpose. A reexamination of older religious narratives shows that, rather than being a new issue, the fear of youthful alienation is a fundamental concern born of beliefs in an intrinsic limit to the knowability of other selves. Chapter nine offers an intimate political biography of a prominent Kaqchikel-Maya family that has produced antiracism activists in a variety of organizations over the last three generations. The constant has been social activism, first in local and regional affairs and most recently in national arenas. But their tactics, their sense of indigenous identity, religious commitments, and ways of moralizing cultural continuity have put members of this

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31

extended family at odds with each other at important junctures. This chapter argues that the ideological diversity of the Maya movement is not solely a product of regional language differences, decentralized community loyalties, or emerging class cleavages. Additionally, Maya cultural constructions of the person, structures of kinship relations, and the political experiences of different historical generations contribute to diverse definitions of antiracism activism and critiques of Pan-Mayanism. These final two chapters examine the impact on local politics of the practice of cultural standardization by competing religious and development groups, and ask if the Maya movement will consolidate its power by displacing or embracing local variants of indigenous multiculturalism. The emerging model is still in flux. Mayanists are actively using the language of rights and cultural relativity to press their demands on the Guatemalan state. Activists face the paradox of having to assert claims in a universalistic language that does not recognize the cultural specificity of their concerns.35 On the one hand, Mayanist intellectuals have long debated alternative models—some hierarchical and theocratic and others egalitarian and ecumenical—for a new society composed of regionalized indigenous languages and peoples inaciones). On the other hand, Mayanists are actively experimenting with decentralized private Maya schools and community councils that privilege the authority of elders and local decision making. How these various arenas of "self-determination" will relate to Guatemala's political future as a multi-ethnic state remains to be seen. It is clear that the movement has been successful in causing many Mayas and increasing numbers of Ladinos to rethink who they are. Less certain is whether, given highly partisan congressional politics and the frustrating pace of change in the national political system, the movement will in the future advocate a territorialized and perhaps religiously informed image of a unified nation or continue to pursue a tactic of state reform and institutional decentralization in which there are many ways of being Maya. This book seeks to contribute a heretofore missing interpretive dimension to literatures on marginalization, democracy, and new social movements— literatures that in Latin America have most often focused on the class-based politics of the popular Left.36 Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (1998) recognized this shortcoming in previous work and convened an international network of scholars to work on the cultural and political dimensions of social movements. The present effort feeds directly into this project and attempts to make the case for an ethnographic approach to the cultural production and practices of political movements. The interpretive political approach taken in this study asks about the ways in which "Maya culture"—conceived of as a fluid and diverse practice— both informs the definition of what is political and influences the internal dynamics of the movement.37 The analysis traces a movement that, in addi-

32

INTRODUCTION

tion to its quest for indigenous rights and a multicultural transformation of the state, seeks to stabilize and standardize core elements of Mayaness that, they argue, survived Spanish colonization and the birth of the modern state. The movement seeks to communicate its message through a revitahzation of traditionalist social forms, such as councils of elders, and through pan-community institutions that have been denied Mayas, their own schools, publishing houses, multilingual court systems, administrative systems, universities, and international forums. This transregional ethnographic approach stands in creative tension with the more urban-centric, textual, and mass media-focused approaches to nation building in cultural studies. As ethnography has been influenced by postmodernism, the field of cultural studies is beginning to pursue ethnographic issues and to see the importance of research on the dispersed sites of cultural production. Moreover, I hope this study will be of interest to anthropologists, comparative sociologists, political scientists, and activists concerned with identity formation, cultural rights, and narratives of selfdetermination in a polycultural world of frequent diasporas and globalized economies, where autonomy is a striking if ironic quest.

One Pan-Mayanism and Its Critics on Left and Right There is the difficulty of defining anticolonialism, in concept and practice, when the ideological context is triply colonial: the Marxist-Leninism of the armed left, the doctrine of National Security of the terrorist state, and the outrage of liberalism that sees only consumption and production. Demetrio Cojti Cuxil (1997a, 95)

IN 1991, the Second Continental Meeting for Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance was convened in a huge, echoey cement-block hall at the dusty fairgrounds just outside Guatemala's second city, Quetzaltenango.1 Throughout this week-long international congress,2 covered by three hundred journalists, the Latin American grassroots Left asserted that diverse political struggles—including those for labor, indigenous, Afro-Latin American, women's, and human rights—could be successfully encompassed by the reigning grassroots paradigm, which called for the organization of the masses by sectors.3 Representing fifty-one ethnic groups from twenty-five countries in the Americas, 259 delegates with voice and vote participated in small work groups and plenary sessions. As one participant assured me, all had impeccable political credentials. Their numbers were swelled by sympathetic spectators, some 125 guests and 362 observers, primarily from Latin America and Europe. An estimated thirty thousand community activists in grassroots organizations4—many of whom were impoverished rural women who did not participate in the congress itself—marched for more than three hours through the city's streets in the final public demonstration of support for the grassroots Left and the goals of the congress. One could not fault the courage of those attending the meetings, which took place in a highly militarized Guatemala, where the murderous repression of political activists as "subversives" continued in the early 1990s. Three decades of military rulers gave way after 1985 to a series of civilian governments, which struggled with the legacy of a highly militarized nationstate. After the failure of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) guerrilla alliance to topple the state in the 1980s, grassroots organi-

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zations with strong ties to the Left—among them the Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC), National Coordinator for Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA), Mutual Support Group (GAM), Council of Ethnic Communities Runujel Junam (CERJ), Highland Campesino Committee (CCDA), and National Council for Guatemala's Displaced (CONDEG)—rededicated themselves to pressing for influential roles in national politics. Aided by Majawil Q'ij's promotion of Maya concerns, these key elements of Guatemala's popular Left found themselves well represented at the congress, with thirty delegates in the national delegation of thirty-five.5 The remaining spots were filled by hurried invitations of "independent" Mayas. Rigoberta Menchu, whose nomination for the Nobel Prize was enthusiastically endorsed at the meeting, facilitated the complex politics of choreographing groups of activists from very different national situations, so they moved toward consensus on movement politics in the post-Cold War world. She also sought to guarantee the safety of the participants through the international surveillance generated by her press conferences and the supportive presence of Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the French president. By all accounts, Menchu's tactics were successful in heading off government reprisals against the Guatemalan participants. Through its leadership and working documents, the congress argued for a unified theory of oppression, the continued relevance of economic class as the master inequity, and the capitalist world in the guise of Western neoliberalism as the prime engine of oppression. In their post-revolutionary discussions of colonialism, neocolonialism, and self-determination, the popular movement portrayed itself as the vital political umbrella: Self-determination, whether it be political independence, confederation, or autonomy, is realized in accordance with the ways peoples/communities (pueblos) practice different forms and styles of organization. Autonomy does not signify the rupture of a state but rather its transformation, since it continues to exercise sovereignty. Autonomy is self-government; it represents the struggle against the centralist state. A popular [grassroots Left] government is necessary to make the economic transformation of the state possible. Therefore, the unity of all oppressed and exploited sectors is vital for the attainment of autonomous self-determination. Moreover, it is necessary to be attentive to hegemonic sectors' attempts to divide the movement by encouraging traditional and reductionist ethnic positions. . . . The popular movement as a whole is the best guarantee indigenous peoples have for their struggle to rescue sovereignty, maintain their connection with the earth and nature, and preserve the spirituality of their culture's communities. The transformation of their position should have popular content, and oppose imperialism and its domestic agents. (Segundo Encuentro 1992, 37)

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Some indigenous participants, however, found political and personal dilemmas in this framing of social conflict and possibilities for change. The Second Continental Meeting achieved only partial success in channeling cultural dissent. Nationally prominent Mayanist leaders shared complaints in conversations between sessions: they had been invited as observers only at the last minute and found themselves marginalized by the rigid structure of the meetings, which in their view allowed only two official representatives of Pan-Maya organizations in the national delegation. Demetrio Cojti Cuxil, among others, saw these problems as indicative of larger differences that had become apparent at Guatemala's democratic opening in 1985: Popular-Maya organizations were not considered part of the Pan-Maya movement because they did not demand indigenous rights. Rather they demanded social rights, especially fundamental ones such as the right to life and physical integrity. They had been embroiled in a fight against the government and army and allied with groups that organized against repression and impunity. From this standpoint, their struggle was heroic and persecution bloody. Their involvement in social struggle6 was evident at the Second Continental Meeting—they cheered in support of Cuba and condemned the United States. Since they manipulated the indigenous issue and very few indigenous delegates came from other countries, Mayanists rejected these meetings. The Left's colonialism was evident at the final march, headed by leftist Ladinos followed by platoons of illiterate peasant Indians making up the body of the march. (1997a, 106-7) Cojti questioned, at that point, whether the international Left's public concern with indigenous issues was designed largely for external consumption, and, consequently, whether international funders might fail to understand differences between class-based and national or ethnic movements (1997a, 84, 137). Indeed there were indigenous populares in the Guatemalan delegation. Yet, the personal and political stakes of grassroots activism created special tensions for these insiders, as American anthropologist Charles Hale explains: Indians who identify as populares generally have chosen to emphasize the demands that unify them with subordinate Mestizos. This does not imply a "loss" of Indian identity ("culture loss" is a problematic term in any case) but it does tend to involve either a shift in priorities away from demands specific to Indian cultural roots, or to a difficult commitment to struggle for those demands from within a predominately non-Indian political movement. (1994b, 36) Some indigenous Guatemalans have made their peace with the grassroots model and have pursued long careers of activism. Others have found elements of the popular movement unresponsive to their personal politics.

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Despite these shortcomings, around the edges of the official program, Mayanists met privately with indigenous representatives from other countries, and, after the congress, a group went out of town to Zunil's famous thermal baths for a private retreat. This was not the first time indigenous leaders from across the Americas created opportunities to discuss common concerns and compare strategies. Rather it was another moment in what some have termed "the Indian awakening in Latin America."7 Skeptics of the congress suggested that the grassroots Left included "indigenous" in the conference title and documentation largely for pragmatic reasons; that is, to tap into the anti-quincentenary fervor throughout the Americas in order to reassert the viability of leftist movements in the years immediately after the Cold War. Although popular politics may have needed renewed support elsewhere in Latin America, the Guatemalan activism continued to be diverse, highly successful, and championed by the international solidarity groups in the face of continuing repression in the 1980s and early 1990s. The popular movement organized many local and national groups that worked with cultivators, migrant laborers, students, urban workers, widows, families of the disappeared, and refugees. The struggle of labor versus capital informed the insurgency and diverse leftist movements with their own histories of organizing specific sectors of the population in Guatemala. This chapter and the next argue that over the last forty years, the movement of oppositional politics away from the class-antagonism paradigm toward a more heterogeneous politics of social movements has been complicated by widespread intolerance of indigenous activism and its distinctive political agenda.8 What characterizes this ambivalence? How are critiques of indigenous mobilization deployed by a variety of political interests? How has this adversarial environment influenced the relation between Pan-Mayanism and the popular movement? Let me start with the dissenters at the Second Continental Meeting, those indigenous leaders who were alienated by an international congress intended to include their interests.

The Development of a Pan-Maya Movement in Guatemala Since the mid 1980s, educated Mayas have worked to create a social movement focused on the cultural revitalization and unification across language divides of indigenous Guatemalans, who most observers now agree make up a marginalized majority of the national population. The Pan-Maya movement seeks recognition of cultural diversity within the nation-state, a greater role for indigenous politics in national culture, a reassessment of economic inequities, and a wider distribution of cultural resources such as education

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and literacy in indigenous languages. The movement's commitment to education—both for its leadership and for the families in rural communities— represents a compelling change, given an educational system in which 70 percent of the public schools offer only four years of classes and 92 percent of the population over fifteen years of age has never finished the conventional six years of primary education (Herrera 1987, 13). Through the movement, Maya academics, development workers, linguists, social scientists, lawyers, and publishers have become public intellectuals and contributors to research centers that produce materials for a variety of educational and political projects. These combinations of cultural identity and profession rarely existed before the early 1970s, when being Maya often meant working as an impoverished peasant agriculturalist, land-starved wage laborer, or market vendor. Most Mayanist professionals have been schooled in Guatemala; a handful have studied in the United States or Europe. Through Maya Studies, the interdisciplinary academic field created by the movement, these intellectuals have formulated counterhistories denouncing the racism of national histories, searing critiques of foreign research practices and scholarship, textbooks to promote Maya language retention, challenges to Western models of development, and political psychology to counteract internalized racism. They condemn colonialism and racism as an ongoing situation rather than a moment of sociogenesis that occurred five centuries ago at the Spanish invasion. Mayanists assert there is a culturally specific indigenous way of knowing: a subject position no one else can occupy and political interests no one else has to defend. The essentialism is tactical and situational: they advance this position to claim unique authority as social critics. Their goal is clear: to undermine the authoritativeness of non-Maya, or kaxlan, accounts—be they Guatemalan Ladinos or foreigners—which, until the recent indigenous activism and resistance surfaced, monopolized the representation of Maya culture and national history. The early years of the movement were focused on issues of cultural origin and self-definition—"Who are we if we are not the negative stereotypes we have been taught?" As one activist put it, Indians were like street children who did not know their parents and therefore could not plan for the future. Echoing these sentiments, a recent poster produced by the Committee for the Decade of the Maya People pictured a mystical volcano ringed by a lake with a Maya couple embracing the four sacred colors of corn in the foreground. The accompanying text read: "Only when a people accepts its history and assumes its identity do they have the right to define their future."9 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Maya Studies publications by Demetrio Rodriguez Guajan (see Raxche' 1989), Demetrio Cojti Cuxil (1991a), and Enrique Sam Colop (1991) were preoccupied with these issues. Since those early years, however, Mayanists have refocused their debates

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more squarely on questions of the best direction for Maya nation building. Cojti Cuxil (1994; 1995) has elaborated the movement's explicit demands on the state for major reforms in administration, language policy, the military, economics, education, communication, and respect for Maya ceremonial centers. Victor Rancanoj (1994) has used Maya hermeneutics to generate a revisionist history of precolonial society and to argue for the renewal of earlier models of authority and leadership in the new social order Mayanists hope to establish. The issue at hand for Mayanist leaders is the longer-term planning of their agendas—done in twenty-year increments to reflect the Maya shape of time and their base-twenty mathematics—rather than the year-to-year planning called for by development funders who follow UN models. The production and circulation of Maya Studies is not an esoteric urban enterprise, given that virtually all participants in the movement come from rural backgrounds. Some have stayed in their home communities working as farmers, school teachers, or extension agents in development organizations. Often, they are regional and grassroots leaders in the agricultural cooperative movement, religious groups, or local development efforts. Others have relocated to urban centers to pursue professional training and higher education, working as professors, bookstore owners, publishers, social workers, administrators, teachers, and professionals for NGOs, UNICEF, and government development programs. On weekends, during vacations, and for major events, professionals often return to their home communities, where many maintain their own immediate families and work on local development projects. It would be short-sighted to dismiss this cultural revival as primordial or marginal to modern politics. Social analysts such as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) have pointed to the reemergence of tradition precisely at times of discontinuity. Anthony F. C. Wallace's early historical work (1972) and James Clifford's postmodernism (1988) have taught us that revitalization is a process of political articulation and cultural hybridizing, not an inevitable nostalgic escape to the past. Clifford Geertz (1973), Ernest Gellner (1983), Richard Fox (1990a), Partha Chatterjee (1993), and others have noted the important role public intellectuals play in social movements and raised questions about the class composition, culture, and politics of nationalist movements. Chantal Mouffe (1993) has warned against essentialism, against the positing of unitary constructions of identity politics.

Contested Views of the Pan-Maya Movement As one celebrated Pan-Maya leader put it: "This wave is not carved in granite; rather, it defines a certain tendency. There is great variation within the Maya movement. Some are more radical in Maya religion, others in Ian-

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guage, others in politics." It is difficult to characterize a movement as institutionally diverse, polycentric, and dynamic as this one. On the revitalization and education fronts, however, Mayanists have given priority to the following projects: (1) Language revitalization, literacy training in Maya languages, and local language committees.10 (2) The revitalization of Maya chronicles of culture, history, and resistance to the Spanish invasion—such as the Popol Vuj and the Annals of the Kaqchikels, which are read as sacred cosmological texts and indigenous histories. There is great fascination with the Maya shape of time; that is, with Maya calendrics and numerics, the great precision of ancient eclipse predictions, and the complex religious associations with historical astronomy. Activists have studied glyphic texts, many of them dynastic histories, with art historians and linguists. Another striking characteristic of the movement is its historical consciousness—its multiculturalist sense of the ways Mayas were written out of national history and its urgency to imagine new histories.11 (3) The production of culturally inclusive school texts and teacher training materials for use in intercultural school programs. Activists have been successful in creating Maya elementary and secondary schools in some communities as a viable alternative to national schools.12 (4) The revitalization of Maya leadership norms, specifically community councils of elders, mid wives, and Maya shaman-priests.13 (5) The dissemination of an internationally recognized discourse of indigenous rights, focusing on recognition and self-determination. The movement envisions a radical transformation of Guatemalan politics to accommodate a pluricultural nation with decentralized state services.14 The movement has sought to make candidates for national office more accountable to indigenous voters by holding public candidate forums before elections.15 Projects that flow from these priorities currently operate throughout the western highlands, where most of the country's indigenous population resides. Although the movement has received support for particular projects from diverse sources—including the European Union, European NGOs, various United Nations entities such as UNICEF, U.S. foundations, U.S.-AID, the Guatemalan government, and national universities 16 —it has also attracted intense skepticism. In the 1990s, Pan-Mayanism's detractors increasingly made their opinions known through the mass media. Open criticism has spurred Mayanists to use the media to disseminate their ideas and generated continued reassessments of the usefulness of dialogues across social movements. Almost from its inception, the Pan-Maya movement was disparaged on the Right and Left in Guatemala and beyond. Critics, including Latin Americanists at U.S. universities, were quick to dismiss the movement in the 1980s, despite the paucity of information on its goals or activities. U.S.-AID

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and Guatemalan business elites hoped to undermine the movement, which, although market-oriented, stresses collective rights to development resources. The Summer Institute of Linguistics, a U.S.-based missionizing organization also known as the Wycliffe Bible Translators, repeatedly clashed with the movement over language issues and control over the production and distribution of publications in indigenous languages. Ladino intellectuals, many of whom were deeply invested in anti-imperialist struggles, militantly opposed ethnic organizing. Local Ladinos generated their own charges of reverse racism and rekindled fears of Indian rebellion.17 European and Latin American development professionals working in UN-sponsored human rights projects also expressed serious reservations about the movement. Regardless of their politics, detractors of Pan-Mayanism have tended to draw from a common pool of images: (1) The movement is accused of separatism, ethnic polarization, and the potential for violence by citing international examples of ethnic nationalism. (2) The movement is accused of violating the local grounding of indigenous identity in place and community. The attempt to create a transcendent sense of "Mayaness" is seen as an unauthentic act culturally and a manipulative act politically. (3) The movement is seen as not appropriate for the country because some regions are populated predominately by a single indigenous language group, some regions are mixed with different proportions of indigenous groups and Ladinos, and other regions are predominately nonindigenous. Return refugee communities are commonly an amalgamation of groups, which after help from human rights groups with popular leanings may identify themselves as campesinos, not Mayas or indigenous. (4) That Ladino culture includes indigenous elements, Maya culture is Ladinoized, and all of Guatemala has been drawn into the globalization of consumer products and popular culture is further seen as erasing the relevance of ethnicbased organizing in favor of blendings in the name of mestizaje and hybridity. (5) Building on language as a key basis of revitalization, activists are criticized for allegedly stressing language group endogamy and seeking to prohibit marriage across language groups. (6) Pan-Maya leaders and urban participants are seen as neither indigenous nor Ladino—but rather as a third ethnicity—because they do not farm the land with wide-bladed hoes, and thus are seen as not rightfully representing their people. In addition to the foregoing, criticism from the popular Left and U.S. Left has added the following issues: (1) The movement is condemned for idealizing Maya community life and focusing on cultural issues rather than dealing with more urgent, material concerns such

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as poverty and access to land for farmers. Given the rapidly growing rural population and the skewed ownership of farmlands, which leave many agriculturalists virtually landless, employment and poverty issues should take first priority (2) The movement, which initially decided not to label itself "political" and avoids the term "activist," is devalued as dodging the real politics of Guatemala. (3) The measure of success of a social movement centers on its ability to achieve mass mobilizations and public protests. Pan-Mayanism, with its focus on language, culture, education, and scholarship, is judged as not passing this basic test to demonstrate its mass appeal or effect. Mayanists dispute these criticisms, which they see as tactical mischaracterizations designed to disempower the movement and attack the intentions and legitimacy of its leadership.18 From their point of view, the Right and Left in Guatemala have either wanted to absorb Mayas or use them as shock troops, as facades for particular political agendas.19 Although they are willing to work with organizations of diverse political tendencies, Mayanists remain convinced of the distinctiveness of their vision, which they find neither translatable into nor reducible to the agendas of other groups. In the 1990s, critiques of Pan-Mayanism have received intensive coverage in Guatemalan newspapers. The pressure was relentless, especially in 1994, 1995, and 1996, with weekly opinion pieces by well-known commentators across the political spectrum. Political debates that used to be fought in the university are now aired to wider audiences in the press. Among the most prolific and controversial of these journalists is Mario Roberto Morales, who has written for Siglo Veintiuno, Prensa Libre, and Cronica. A long-standing literary intellectual in Guatemala who sees himself as a leftist, Morales is currently finishing his Ph.D. in literature at the University of Pittsburgh. His tactic—mimicked with varying degrees of sophistication by other journalists, including many on the Right—uses strategies from cultural studies to deconstruct and delegitimize Pan-Mayanism. Morales is committed to attacking "Maya fundamentalism" as an elite construction promulgated by intellectuals who do not represent the masses of impoverished "indios"10 because they are far removed from community leaders. In his words: "This does not mean that indigenous revindications are invalid. I am against Pan-Mayanism as a construction, not against indigenous rights. They are two distinct issues."21 Although his graduate-school advisers may not know this, Morales has cleverly appropriated a method many associate with the cultural Left in the United States to provide the Right and other readers with political ammunition in Guatemala. Pan-Mayanist leaders see his columns—along with the work of Miguel Angel Asturias (1977), Severo Martinez Pelaez (1985), and other newspaper commentators—as key sources of "intellectual racism" in the country. With a lively cynical postmodern tone, Morales employs images of glob-

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alized popular culture, hybridity, mimesis, culturally fabricated otherness, and mestizaje to argue against the existence of "the Maya" in Guatemala. 22 In a similar vein, he takes on structuralist models of power and racial hegemony for his newspaper readers: Where—in the analyses of the radicalized Maya intellectuals, the Ladino Indianphiles or even the Ladinoists—are the kids who walk around with tape players on their shoulders listening to heavy metal, with Reebok shoes, punk haircuts, and t-shirts that say "Save the Tropical Rainforest," and who have last names like Tujab, Quexel or Ujpan? Anthropologists don't like to get into these new identities because they stand outside their schemes. They prefer to continue thinking of Guatemala as a country where there are Indians and Ladinos or Mayas and mestizos and where the good guys in the film are the Indians and the bad guys are the Ladinos, so one has to help the Indians because they are the victims. (Siglo Veintiuno, Jan. 7, 1996)23 . . . Evidence indicates that what dominates now are hybrid identities—impure (Indians with Reeboks or Pierre Cardin, depending on whether they work washing cars or for international organizations), negotiable, plural, and mediated by the laws of the market. . . . I want to show that the idea that racism exists only in ladinoness—that for discrimination to exist it has to be generated from a position of power, and, since indigenes don't have power, they are not racists—is only an idea in the realm of pure formal logic. Moreover, it is demagoguery if power is understood only as the structural power of the state apparatus and if other forms of power—which allow discrimination against Ladinos in areas of labor contracting by indigenous bourgeois exporters—are ignored. Racism presupposes genetic superiority, and here there is too much mixing (mestizaje) and hybrid identity for anyone to feel sufficiently certain, when he shakes his genealogical tree, that a conqueror or conquered won't fall from it. (Cronica, July 19, 1996) There cannot be racism, Morales suggests, unless the races are distinctive and hierarchies unambiguous. In his writings, the postmodern insights of decentralized power, multiple identities, cultural and biological hybridities, and transnational cultural flows render the Ladino/indigenous split and the language of ethnic subordination a two-dimensional caricature of the national situation. Morales has devised provocative, contemporary arguments, elements with which many cultural observers would find themselves in agreement, at least in theory. Latin America is a dynamic, fluid cultural field in which plural identities are being continually reconstituted and in which international mass media and consumer products are taken-for-granted aspects of life in even remote areas. There is little doubt that changes that accompany globalization have complicated older ethnic divisions of labor. Despite these probing insights, however, many social analysts fault the deconstructive impulse as a

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mental exercise that makes invidious ethnic discrimination and poverty dissolve before one's eyes—but, of course, only on paper. For his part, Morales sidesteps extreme deconstructionism by appropriating the critiques of capitalism generated by cultural studies. He asserts that, far from being a local creation, international funders promote Pan-Mayanism as part of their agenda to expand global markets, exploit cheap labor, and champion exotic others for tourist consumption: It is clear that the market does not annul ethnic prejudice or discrimination. But what it does is to convert them into merchandise, into tourist attractions. And, thus, as fat and thin sell their humanity, considered defective, to the cinemagraphic market, marginal, subaltern, Indian cultures rapidly become "othernesses," sold to tourism as part of the New Age wave, with its esoterics for tourists in a hurry. In this scheme, the ideological construction of Mayanism [mayismo] is nothing more than a product for the academic funders' market, on the one hand, and, on the other, a basis for the game of democracy and for the tourist market. All of which is fine. But it should be branded as such because if Mayanism wants to sell itself to us as a superior fundamentalism, we won't buy it. (Siglo Veintiuno July 7, 1996) Morales designs his columns to incite Mayanists and to delight their opponents. Mayanists find his mockery deeply offensive because it demeans their movement and their cultural nationalist project and dehumanizes Mayas as objects for consumption. Cultural difference becomes oddity and spectacle— "as fat and thin sell their humanity, considered defective, to the cinemagraphic market." Capitalist orientalism, which profits by creating exotic commodities for this market, allows no exit. The role cast for Mayas of inescapable "otherness" shows how they have already lost the struggle for self-determination to the globalizing forces of incorporation. In this view, no one avoids complicity with the market: tourism, academics, human-rights advocates, international cooperation—and by extension Morales's writing and mine—are all industries that for their own reasons support the PanMaya "boom": Human rights, women's rights, those for children, Indians, and gays are the issues for which there is now international money. So projects to develop these areas constitute the nucleus and the motive for the formation, cohesion, and legitimation of groups and associations which seek to describe themselves as new social movements. These movements do not present demands for socialist or capitalist modernity, but rather a (postmodern) revindication of specific groups, which do not question the capitalist system but only suggest reforms of it and within it. . . . Thus, money from international cooperation is the principal motor of Mayanism and the boom in indigenous movements. Also for the peace signing. In other words, western paternalism, through its act of contrition, incorporates (not separates) the marginal subject and the subaltern in the globalizing scheme. (Siglo Veintiuno, July 22, 1996).

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Once again, one might well agree, certainly in principle, with the importance of interrogating the interests of foreign support for social movements and international development initiatives. However Morales's reductionism and polemicism become apparent when he argues that cultural resurgence is all play-acting by Ladinoized Maya intellectuals serving as opportunistic facilitators for those seeking to widen their markets. In practice, Mayanists have complicated views of the foreign funding of their work in publishing and education. Moreover, the leadership is highly critical of tourism that returns nothing to local communities and perpetuates images of timeless Maya culture. My problem with Morales's argument lies not with his desire to question the personal motivations of Mayanists, the importance of global markets and powers in national affairs, or the parallels of tourism, anthropology, and human rights solidarity. Rather I find that his framing simply avoids serious engagement with the social practices, the everyday significance of the market, and the national and local politics to which this movement reacts as it struggles for rights that have been denied much of the national population. Displacing agency to the international market has important political uses. If Pan-Mayanism and rights struggles are understood as foreign impositions, then Morales has freed the country from the need to examine and transform its own policies and institutions. Significantly, Morales's views attracted other commentators at significant political moments in the 1990s when public debates intensified during the UN-mediated peace negotiations between the Guatemalan government and the URNG guerrillas and, after it became clear the accords would pass, during the ongoing discussions of what should be implemented and what should be politically sidelined. Interestingly, Morales parts ways with many of his fellow commentators when it comes to Guatemala's potential for ethnic violence. As adversaries of multicultural reforms, many conservative Ladino commentators opposed the ratification of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169 (which recognizes the legitimacy of indigenous rights in a variety of spheres)24 and specifically denounced the peace negotiation's Accord on Identity and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Mario Alberto Carrera and Julio Cesar Toriello, for example, invoked images of atrocities in the Balkans and Nazi Germany to claim that the recognition of indigenous rights would fuel ethnic conflict in Guatemala. Carrera (Grdfico, May 9 and 11, 1995, Apr. 27, 1996) argued that segregation, polarizing leadership, and uncertainties over the implementation of the accords and models of nation would lead to protests and instability. As secretary of the Guatemalan Academy of Language and corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy, he worried about the place of the Spanish language—the "roots" and "marrow" of national culture—in a society where the Academy for Maya Languages of Guatemala (ALMG), a government-sponsored entity run by

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Mayanists from each language community in the country, intends to play a central role in language policy. Toriello (Siglo Veintiuno, May 6, 1995) argued that the accords created a new minority—composed of Ladinos, mestizos, and European immigrants— who would not enjoy equal treatment before the law because of the imposition of new cultural rights (such as the recognition of indigenous languages and culturally specific styles of decision-making), which, he asserts, conflict with established rights. Both journalists express alarm over land conflicts, which have only become more serious over time, and the new demands inspired by the accords. These lines of criticism most likely narrowed the scope of the final identity accords. Although Morales has occasionally expressed reservations about indigenous rights as "special" group rights, he believes that the market, not the threat of ethnic conflict, will prevail: The false claim (which I often made before) about the existence of a threat of ethnic war, if the disadvantageous position of indigenous Guatemalans is not remedied by the powers of the state on down, is not certain. It's enough to travel through the countryside to become aware that the laws of the market have brought indigenes into global postmodernity. They are making the best capital available from their culture for investment in tourism and their best merchandise for export. In this context an ethnic war does not have protagonists. (Cronica, July 19, 1996) As an active figure in Guatemala's intense literary circles and professor at the University of San Carlos, Morales has long been a critical observer of capitalism. He supported the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) guerrillas at the age of nineteen in 1966 as a "militante de base." After the western branch of the FAR fractured in 1976 and the Organization of People in Arms (ORPA) consolidated in 1979, he followed a splinter group, the MRP. His disenchantment with the URNG—which became the umbrella organization for the insurgency and, later, a chief protagonist in the peace process—dates from a period when he lived in Nicaragua and was jailed and psychologically tortured after what he describes as false accusations were made about him by Guatemalan guerrillas to the Sandinistas (Siglo Veintiuno, Oct. 29, 1995). After years in exile, he returned to Guatemala in 1992 as a cosmopolitan intellectual, cultural promoter, and journalist. He sees himself as a left-leaning public intellectual critical of the URNG, the PAN political party currently in power, and Pan-Mayanism. Various elements of the Left seem painfully eager to reframe his changing politics as an instance of post-Cold War leftist self-criticism.25 His deconstruction of Maya identity echoes the modernist argument of the well-known communist intellectual in exile, Severo Martinez Pelaez (1985), who wrote that Maya culture died with the conquest and that today's indigenous culture is only a refraction of colonial constructions of the other.26 In her provocative analysis of

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Martinez Pelaez, Carol Smith (1991) notes how easily Ladino racism moves across the political spectrum between Left and Right.27 Unfortunately for this historical moment of Maya resurgence, Ladino columnists from the intellectual Left were very quiet in print in the mid-1990s. Their public unwillingness to engage the authors of this anti-indigenous hostility, to probe Ladino identity and entitlements, or to offer more complex readings of Maya resurgence has meant that judgments of the movement have tended to be ethnically polarized in the mass media.28 Mayanists have not been defenseless or unselfcritical in this war of words. Demetrio Cojti writes for Siglo Veintiuno and El Regional, Estuardo Zapeta contributes regularly on a range of subjects to Siglo Veintiuno, Miguel Angel Velasco Bitzol contributes to La Republica as a member of CECMA, Rigoberto Queme Chay writes for El Regional, novelist Gaspar Pedro Gonzales offers cultural analysis in the magazine Tinamit, and Enrique Sam Colop began regular columns for Prensa Libre in 1996. Many of these writers contribute to the national bimonthly news supplement Iximulew, which has a circulation of 50,000 copies and is edited by Velasco Bitzol at CECMA with the help of German Churruchich, Demetrio Rodriguez, Martin Chacach, and Obdulio Son. This is a highly educated, well-published group of Maya intellectuals.29 Cojti, Sam, and Gonzales are elder statesmen of the movement and have written widely in their own right. Maya viewpoints on public debates have an additional route of circulation through Rutzijol, which republishes bimonthly collections of national news about Mayas from a variety of political perspectives and includes its own collective editorial responses to current political issues and coverage of Maya events. Guatemala's most important Maya intellectual, Cojti, used the commentary genre in a leading newspaper, Siglo Veintiuno, to make high-profile interventions during the negotiations of the identity accord. His commentaries dismissed polemical attacks on Mayanists as "marxists, racists, radicals, bigots, purists, etc." and focused instead on collective rights and models of the State. In the last weeks, we have read various newspaper articles that attack and reject Maya demands for the restructuring the State and for an ethnic reordering to allow the recognition of regional autonomy. We are referring to assertions, among others, found in articles by Mr. Sandoval, Lionel Toriello, Marta Altolaguirre, Mario David Garcia, Eduardo Evertsz, etc. These writers are not totally opposed to Maya demands, since the majority accept that the poverty Mayas suffer must be combatted and some support demands for participation in wider spheres of the State. But almost no one accepts the shift toward a State with autonomous units. . . . . . . Maya people recognize rights at the level of collective rights which have as their subject the community/people (pueblo). If individual rights were sufficient, they would not be participating in the Maya movement, which involves coopera-

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tion among social classes. Its object is to defend the interests of the Maya community and not of a particular social class. (Feb. 16, 1995) For Cojti, constitutionally derived individual equality does not confront the problem of hierarchical relations between Maya and nonindigenous communities. In 1996 the hostility of Ladino columnists escalated. As mainstream institutional editorials began to echo the biting language of partisan columnists, the directors of Mayanist organizations met privately to decide whether they should respond in print. With the exception of young Zapeta, who thrives on direct engagement with all parties, they decided not to publish direct counterattacks and, instead, to continue the process of interpreting the relation between Pan-Mayanism and Guatemalan politics for the public.30 For their part, highly regarded progressive Ladino intellectuals, who have long histories of popular support, grew alarmed by the crescendo of hostility and worried that it would only fuel ethnic antagonism and complicate dialogues for social reconstruction after the peace accords. Ladino intellectuals began to meet privately to explore their personal views of identity and cultural difference and to pursue opportunities for off-the-record dialogues with Maya leaders. That these concerns are more than academic is clear from the ethnic tensions in Quetzaltenango, the country's second-largest city. In 1996 opponents of Rigoberto Queme Chay, the first Maya mayor elected in recent history, pursued a vitriolic anti-Maya campaign, which publicized its cause in racist graffiti throughout the city. Mayas, who make up just over half the urban population, went on alert. The Prensa Libre editorial, with a very telling title—Indians? Ladinos?—No! Only Guatemalans—took the incident very seriously: In fact, Guatemala has lived in constant confrontation during the last four decades, and now, as the end of internal armed conflict nears, we speak of the beginning of a period of peace. It would be lamentable if a new conflict began, this time racial, which could have greater consequences than the revolutionary war promoted by the extreme Left (Sept. 2, 1996). In this moment of transition, debates about Pan-Mayanism serve as a veiled language for resistance to Maya socioeconomic mobility.

Cultural Capital and the Emergence of a Parallel Middle Class Implicit in many of the criticisms of Pan-Mayanism is a Guatemalan version of the "racism versus class conflict" debate about the real sources of unequal life chances in ethnically plural, class-stratified societies. Rather than seeing

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class and ethnicity as politically and culturally interactive, critics from a variety of positions on the Left have long argued that Mayanists are making the wrong choice in stressing their cultural identity and ethnic discrimination as the country's core social issues. One can also see in these debates a reproduction of the material/cultural cleavage that continues to trouble the social sciences despite all the paradigm blurring over the last several decades. In this instance, material conditions are portrayed as more autonomous, real, and basic than anything else. To reforms outside the grammar of land and labor, the classic reply from the international Left is "but what about exploitation?" through which critics seek to convey a materialist urgency that trumps cultural issues, no matter how worthy. The fundamentals of the material world—in this construction, land, labor, economic class structures, and ethnicity itself—are not infrequently conceptualized by popular movements as if they were transparent realities, free from cultural and social mediation. There is little sense that in practice material demands are politically advanced selective constructions, conveyed in fields of social relations created by popular organizations that also inform their significance. The alternative framing I want to advance would confront the cultural issues (and political interests) infused in the construction of materialist politics as well as the materialist concerns (and political interests) infused in cultural framings of politics. The problem of culture and class remains a challenge for all poststructural analysts, especially given the legacy of structuralist frameworks such as historical materialism, internal colonialism, and world systems theory in Latin American Studies. Most analysts would agree that classes are not theoretical abstractions—they are culturally and materially fashioned in particular situations, as are other forms of stratification. High theory aside, class is not a separable domain but rather in practice a multidimensional form of stratification, often gendered, racialized, and saturated with cultural difference. For instance, as a result of the genocidal civil war in Guatemala, impoverished rural widows became a distinctive political-economic class—the result of Maya family structure, agrarian sexual divisions of labor, and the violent repression that killed their husbands and left these women without a subsistence base. Courageously, CONAVIGUA, the popular movement's rural widows' organization, brought women from this gendered class together for crucial psychological, political, and material support. The constructed nature of this identification does not diminish the vital way CONAVIGUA came to meet the needs of women and children who were scarred by the war's violence. Thus, the political recognition of a particular "class-based" identity—by mobilizing groups around certain foundational representations of social reality—is also a process of construction. Inevitably, this political process is

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fraught with many of the same dilemmas, such as the standardization and displacement of local culture, that critics attach to the Pan-Maya movement. When Mayanist leaders assert that "class conflict is not our issue" but rather all forms of contemporary colonialism and racism are, one sees the heterodoxy and originality of the movement. What they mean here is that "class struggle" is not their unitary framework. They seek to build a crossclass movement—a new sort of Maya solidarity—that would include middle-class professionals and business people as well as cultivators, students, teachers, development workers, and rural shopkeepers. In fact, urban migration for employment or physical safety and novel organizational involvements mean that members of many extended families routinely have multiple class/ethnic identifications, localized in different ways in rural and urban space. Recognizing the interplay of cultural and material issues allows us to ask important questions of social movements, whatever their politics. How do activists structure the production and circulation of the political vision crucial to their movement? How in practice do other participants consume this imagery and generate their own social meanings in the process? Movements may seek to change access to all sorts of resources, both to attract participants and to pursue their political goals. The creation and redistribution of "cultural capital"—which in this setting includes all sorts of media, education, knowledge of the past and present, languages with which to interrogate the status quo, cosmological knowledge, models of community authority, experience with organizational cultures, and skills to communicate across language communities and through various technologies—involves differential access to resources that make a material and cultural difference in peoples' lives. In this context, scholars of social movements might consider the utility of an anthropological notion of "cultural capital."31 Unfortunately for the case at hand, analysts have conventionally understood cultural capital to be a monopoly of the mainstream. In an early psychological approach, Oscar Lewis's notion of the "culture of poverty" (1966) condemns capitalism but also faults the underclasses for the poverty of their lived culture, which meant their lack of idealized mainstream norms (many of which, in fact and in practice, ironically elude the middle class).32 From a sociological perspective, Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1986) presents a formulation of cultural capital and status hierarchies as singular ladders with high-status culture at the apex. For him, cultural capital is embodied in individuals through family socialization and schooling while being objectified in material objects and the media. In bourgeois society, there is a clear, if sometimes mystified, relation between economic capital and cultural capital (1986:242-43, 246). More recently, Philippe Bourgois (1995) has urged that the notion of cul-

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tural capital be historicized and made interactive by noting how inner-city entrepreneurs in the United States mobilize their own cultural and social capital in highly segregated social settings. He remains astutely aware of the political and economic contexts in which this occurs. But although Bourgois acknowledges the local deployment of different kinds of cultural capital, he largely dismisses their salience for or impact on the wider society. Such approaches—especially when they are generalized by their later interpreters—tend to portray cultures as bounded groups and communities rather than to pursue, as Michael Kearney (1996) urges, the transnationalism and polyculturalism that individuals in marginalized communities have used to manipulate status hierarchies and widen their access to resources at the center and the margins. Along these lines, I would argue for a concept of cultural capital that (a) identifies the ways in which specific cultural formations in their larger contexts give distinctive shapes to the cultural capital they find relevant, (b) recognizes the circulation and distribution of nonmaterial and nonquantifiable cultural resources as an additional issue for social movements, and (c) draws our attention to the changing forms of capitalist production—in this moment of transnational intensification, the global flows of knowledge, information, and people—which make certain media and transculturalism especially important and powerful. Note that in the Pan-Mayanist case there is no simple link between cultural capital and economic capital; rather, specific links need to be problematized in particular situations.33 In fact, many Mayanists have access to a great deal of cultural capital—from fluency in indigenous languages and shamanism to the high-tech tools of the electronic age—yet the overwhelming majority live in modest economic circumstances. At work, they have been quick to push development donors for access to computer technology for their research and publication efforts. Specialized software now facilitates the publication of educational materials and research on Maya linguistics, pre-Columbian Maya calendrics, historical astronomy, and glyph texts. Public intellectuals have mastered the conventions of national and international meetings as public forums for their work. Tactically, Mayanists have internationalized and hybridized Maya culture to intensify and repoliticize the difference between indigenous and Ladino communities at home.34 When Mayanists make charges of widespread racism in Guatemala instead of focusing on class conflict, they seek radically to reframe who is accountable to social criticism. For them, Ladino peasants, urban migrants, and the working classes are complicit along with elites in the reproduction of prejudices that have destructive effects in everyday life. A wide array of "public" institutions is also implicated. The signal problem for social action—as the labor/capital analysts would have it—is not limited to Guatemala's tiny economic elite, which, shockingly, owns 75 percent of the country's agricultural land. It is additionally the more diffuse persistence of

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racism in national culture, where indigenous illiteracy rates run twice as high as Ladino rates35 and where everyday life and the media are untroubled by open discussions of indigenous people as not rightful participants in civil society and as not ready for jobs, education, or elective office because of their ethnic inferiority. Education and nontraditional jobs are major issues for Maya families, given highland demographic pressures, which make it clear to many youths that their futures will likely take them away from their parents' wide-bladed hoes and three-stone cooking hearths.36 Class tensions, however, are racialized in Guatemala for Ladinos who resent the mobility of Mayas and their demands for political space.37 Many leaders have had firsthand experiences of resentment to Maya mobility. Doubtless, one source of the negative feelings toward Mayanist leaders is the growing competition between the parallel middle classes for professional and office employment in urban areas.38 Middle-class Ladino intellectuals with social-science degrees now face a new source of direct competition for development work as institutions are caught in neoliberal economic pressures to downsize development, academic, and state bureaucracies. Interestingly, while Maya professionals are aware of job competition, they argue that indigenous professionals bring to these positions specialized fluency in indigenous languages and cosmological knowledge, which few Ladinos invest time in learning. What especially puzzles Maya intellectuals is the ambivalence—which they see as hypocrisy—of some international scholars, human rights advocates, and development workers toward their achievements in the face of so many barriers.39 Here they would argue that there are diverse ways of being Maya.

Two Coalitions and the Peace Process 29, 1996, huge crowds gathered in Guatemala City's central square and cheered representatives of the government, military, and guerrillas as they signed the "Accord for a Firm and Lasting Peace." The counterinsurgency war had finally ended, twelve years after the worst of the conflict. In the end, Guatemala's difficult peace negotiations spanned four presidencies, a coup, and many restructurings of the negotiating bodies.1 While the peace accord represents only the first step in what will be a demanding process of reconciliation and reconstruction, it nevertheless reflects an extraordinary political achievement. One key element of the behind-thescenes peace process was the involvement of popular Left and Mayanist groups, who saw this as a unique opportunity to push for the demilitarization and democratization of the country. Their input not only redefined Guatemalan political culture but also facilitated a rethinking by both groups of their characteristic analyses of inequality. The surprise was that these and other civilian groups gained access to the peace process at all (Cojti Cuxil 1997c). How was a peace accord achieved in a situation where low-intensity warfare had continued to undercut democracy for more than a decade? How did indigenous issues become central to the peace process when neither of the negotiating parties had a history of commitment to multiculturalism? To answer these questions, it is necessary to retrace the peace process, understand the novel indigenous coalitions it activated, and consider the wide array of national and international actors who found the creation of a more open democracy, however imperfect, an important alternative to military control. ON DECEMBER

The Seeming Intractability of Conflict Tidal waves of warfare in the late 1970s and 1980s took a devastating toll on Guatemala, especially in the western highlands, where most of the country's indigenous citizens live. An estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people were killed; half a million people out of a national population of 8 million became internal refugees; 150,000 fled to Mexico as political and economic refugees; and 200,000 found their way to other countries, such as the United States.2 This was the worst of a series of national crises during the three decades of authoritarian regimes that plagued the country after 1954.

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Even after the reduction of mass violence and the turn to civilian rule with the election of President Vinicio Cerezo in 1985, the military had few incentives to negotiate with the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) guerrilla coalition, which sought an end to armed conflict. It had long been clear that the insurgents would not be able to topple the state and establish a revolutionary socialist government. Their numbers were small—dwindling in 1996 to several thousand rural guerrillas facing an army of forty thousand soldiers—and civilian support had been brutally suppressed. Despite its best efforts, however, the army was unable to extinguish the insurgency or capture its leadership—in contrast to Peru, where the Shining Path guerrilla movement had been vanquished with the capture of its leader, Abimael Guzman, by special forces in 1991. The military resisted peace in Guatemala because it would inevitably bring military downsizing and restrict the army's power to script presidential decision making and national policy. Furthermore, negotiations might yet give communist insurgents the victory they had been denied on the field of battle. Peace negotiations dragged on with few tangible results. The guerrillas searched for political leverage where at first glance it appeared they had very little. The military seemed hesitant to engage a process that could only strip them of their substantial coercive power, and the government struggled with its image as a human-rights violator with little credibility in international circles. Interestingly, in 1997 the minister of defense, Brig. Gen. Balconi Turcios, argued that despite these impediments an inner group coalesced early in the negotiations. The challenge was to find a way out of intractable disagreements that had plagued the process between 1987, when President Cerezo created the National Commission for Reconciliation as a forum for civilian discussions of peace, and 1993, when negotiations between the principal antagonists began in earnest, only to be interrupted by a coup.3 By the early 1990s, many Guatemalans felt the time was right for a negotiated peace. After Rigoberta Menchu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, international attention turned to human-rights abuses, indigenous issues, and Guatemala's unresolved politics. The popular movement captured the high moral ground by drawing public attention to the tragedies of hundreds of thousands of refugees, forced military recruitment, and clandestine cemeteries. Members of the Pan-Maya movement, which gained prominence in the late 1980s, saw cultural stakes in the peace process. It was a chance for them to gain recognition of cultural and collective rights and to argue for a state in which Maya communities would have "decision-making power over their own destiny." Their arguments for Maya recognition and self-determination echoed those articulated by indigenous groups working through the United Nations:

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All people have the right to take part freely in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and participate in scientific progress and its benefits. The dignity and rights recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights imply the recognition of the person as a social being, affiliated with a community, ethnic group, nation, or state and at the same time as a distinctive social being in terms of language, religion, culture, or other pluralizing or diversifying conditions. (ALMG 1997, 1, emphasis mine) For them, the issue was how to set the framework for asserting commonalities and legitimizing distinctiveness.4 Guatemala's economic elite, which had supported authoritarian rule in the past, came to see the pariah status of the country as a liability for their business dealings, especially in the emerging world of global assembly lines, the European Union, and transnational investment opportunities. After years of U.S. sanctions for human rights abuses and European support of grassroots organizing, Guatemala could not reenter the community of nations without a definitive peace. While politically leery of other Guatemalan sectors on many issues, the business community came to recognize the economic interests involved in a move to a more open society. Finally, the civilian population wanted some sense of closure so that it could turn to other pressing social problems. Citizens had been exhausted by the militarization of daily life; the displacement of so many families from their home communities; the burden of war taxes extorted by underpaid soldiers, guerrillas, and criminals alike; and the fate of family members who had been kidnapped and tortured and had "disappeared" to unknown fates. Without ending the civil war and demobilizing armed forces on both sides, how would Guatemala cope with the legacies of violence, endemic poverty, and unemployment, a rapidly growing population, escalating street crime, and the growing use of the country as a transshipment point for international drug cartels? The power of crosscutting coalitions among politically disparate groups became clear in 1993 when President Serrano Elias attempted a Fujimoristyle5 authoritarian takeover of his own government, instituted media censorship, and attempted to disband Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution. A surprising alliance of business elites, union groups, students, and indigenous leaders convinced the military that such a regime would lack international and national legitimacy. The takeover's failure demonstrated the powerful fluidity of interests and factions in Guatemala and the growing citizen involvement in national politics. The momentum for democratic change was propelled by the overwhelming rejection of the coup by national and international groups. The peace process quickly gained momentum in 1994 with a reorganization that designated the United Nations as the moderator between antago-

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nists, established the Assembly of Civil Society as the forum for indirect civilian input, and created the Group of Friends (including Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Spain, Norway, and the United States) to support the process internationally. Guatemala was surrounded by countries that had recently found ways to end internal wars. Nicaragua and El Salvador, for example, had reincorporated guerrilla forces into civil society and the political party system. In fact, the negotiation of El Salvador's peace accords in 1990-92, brokered by the United Nations, paved the way for Guatemala. This history also provided an important lesson: to be successful, negotiations might well benefit from constructing a mandate beyond the immediate concern of demobilizing armed groups. Some observers felt the El Salvador process had not gone far enough. A fuller agenda of issues might provide the opportunity to bring wider democratic reforms and address the root causes of violence.6 Many Guatemalans found it ironic and disconcerting that antagonistic armed forces with little experience in democracy were negotiating the fate of the nation in distant, secretive talks in Europe and Mexico. In response to these tensions, the Assembly of Civil Society set up consultative discussions with civilian leaders from a variety of social sectors to provide advisory documents for the peace process. The assembly brought together representatives of groups with very different politics and created space for debates and alternative proposals. Maya activists worked through the Coordinator of Organizations of the Maya People of Guatemala (COPMAGUA), which commissioned position papers from different groups and worked toward a consensus on key issues in order to influence the assembly.7 In this way, popular and Maya groups, among others, gained institutionalized representation and the opportunity to organize their own parallel meetings in a process that might otherwise have thoroughly marginalized civilian input. As a result of pressures, compromise, and consensus-building, indigenous rights gained a forum in the negotiations. Grassroots popular groups— whose high-profile leaders captured support from their Latin American counterparts, European and North American solidarity movements, international Catholic activists, and liberal Protestant groups—had promulgated human rights discourse in their early days of labor organizing and more recently in responding to military repression. To these concerns, Pan-Mayanists added the issue of cultural rights and self-determination, which they advocated through the Council of Maya Organizations of Guatemala (COMG), an umbrella group founded in the late 1980s.8 Pan-Mayanists drew support from discussions at the United Nations on the rights of politically marginalized indigenous groups.9 The European Economic Community and northern European NGOs directly supported projects of cultural reaffirmation in the name of social justice. In the end, the peace process generated a separate Accord on Identity and

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the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, signed on March 31, 1995, by the government, military, and URNG high command and put into force at the conclusion of the peace process a year later.11 (See appendix one for a detailed summary of the four sections of the accords.) The identity accords called on the government to pursue the following commitments and reforms: Recognition of Guatemala's indigenous people as descendants of an ancient people who speak diverse, historically related languages and share a distinctive culture and cosmology. Non-Maya Xinca and Garifuna communities are accorded equivalent status. Recognition of the legitimacy of using indigenous languages in schools, social services, official communications, and court proceedings. Recognition and protection of Maya spirituality and spiritual guides and the conservation of ceremonial centers and archaeological sites as indigenous heritage, which should involve Mayas in their administration. Commitment to education reform, specifically the integration of Maya materials and educational methods, the involvement of families in all areas of education, and the promotion of intercultural programs for all children. Indigenous representation in administrative bodies on all levels, the regionalization of government structures, and the recognition of localized customary law and community decision-making powers in education, health, and economic development. Recognition of communal lands and the reform of the legal system so Maya interests are adequately represented in the adjudication of land disputes. The distribution of state lands to communities with insufficient land. Despite these achievements, Mayanists hold that the accord process was seriously compromised by secrecy, limited Maya input, and disregard of indigenous norms of consultation with communities and elders. Of great concern is the fact that the final document dealt only obliquely with collective rights. Major issues such as the recognition of regional autonomy, historic land rights, and the officialization of Maya leadership norms were deemed irreconcilable and dropped. In practice, governmental "promises to promote" the various legislative reforms outlined in the accords left many loopholes and ambiguities in a political system where antireform forces are experienced and well-organized. Other central issues were eliminated from the agenda when they were transferred for discussion to negotiations for the accord on socioeconomic issues. What could one expect, asked editorialists in Rutzijol,12 given that the formal negotiations were between guerrilla leaders and government representatives? Nevertheless, the decision to make indigenous rights a separate stage in the peace negotiations—which, after all, were explicitly convened to demobilize guerrilla and counterinsurgency forces and establish the framework for political peace—signified a breakthrough for the movement. After summa-

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rizing critiques of the assembly's process, Mayanist representative Jose Serech reported that some Maya groups nevertheless concluded: "The accord widens and opens space in all levels of national life . . . space that until our time has been historically reserved by the colonizers and their descendants. It is a formal instrument to combat racism" (Serech 1995, 7). The document calls for an explicit public acknowledgment of the fierce discrimination Guatemala's indigenous majority has endured on the basis of their distinctive origin, culture, and language. As a consequence, the document argues, indigenous Guatemalans have often been unable to exercise their rights or gain effective political representation. Much of the accord's language (see Saqb'ichil/COPMAGUA 1995 and appendix one) focuses on the state's recognition of indigenous languages, cosmology, spirituality, dress, customary law, and sacred places of worship. For its part, the government repeatedly promises to work with the legislature to promote constitutional reforms to make Guatemala a "multiethnic, culturally plural, and multilingual" nation-state where ethnic discrimination will be prohibited. The government also commits itself to seek institutional reforms in the courts, make sexual harassment a crime, and decentralize and regionalize the school system. Implementation of the identity accords has involved the creation of joint governmental-Maya commissions to make policy recommendations for constitutional and legislative change on highly contentious issues for the country and the movement. Their stress on consensus decision making through frequent meetings and public forums has been extraordinarily demanding of time and energy for Mayanists who see this as a unique opportunity to forge coalitions around controversial issues. Some Ladinos have found their participation a consciousness-raising experience, especially when the hearings broke through the accepted compartmentalization of Guatemalan life to reveal hidden injustices. For instance, during the 1997 Second Congress on Maya Studies, Frederico Fahsen, a member of the European-identified elite, epigrapher, and member of the Commission on Sacred Sites, described his group's daunting responsibility to produce in a period of only ten months a comprehensive survey of the country's Maya religious centers, some regionally and nationally famous and others the locus of devotion for particular communities, families, and individuals. In public hearings, the commission, which has also involved Mayanist leaders such as Narciso Cojti, listened to accounts of the efflorescence of Maya spirituality during the violence and painful reports of current religious repression, including the destruction of mountaintop altars by evangelicals, the looting of tombs and archaeological sites for the international market in pre-Columbian artifacts, the blocking of diviners' access to traditional ceremonial centers by property owners, and the hostility of Catholic Action and charismatic groups toward practitioners of Maya spirituality,

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whom they denigrate as witches (brujos). Fahsen found these instances of intolerance deeply disturbing, both because of their obvious injustice and because, as a member of the elite, he had been shielded from awareness of these social tensions. On a more optimistic note, he described the recent efforts of some communities to promote the reconciliation of Catholic Action catechists and Maya spiritual guides (ajq'ijab). The peace process has been marked by a shift in Mayanist discourse on sacred cosmology and nation away from a theocratic model, advocated by some activists, in which Maya religion and priests would rule supreme. The emerging ecumenical recognition of Maya spirituality and spiritual guides leaves room for a variety of relations with other religious groups, a multiplicity of individual religious practices, a diffuse understanding of Maya cosmology as cross-cutting conventional religious divisions, and secular Mayas whose activism is religiously disinterested. As a result, striking esoteric Maya ceremonies conventionally used to convene public events have been shortened and made more accessible across language divides, while many families continue Mayanist healing and devotional activities along with Catholic masses to celebrate their children's graduations. Another fruit of the peace process has been the Commission on Officialization, organized by the Academy for Maya Languages of Guatemala. Building on the academy's national network of community language committees, the commission convened consultative workshops in each of the country's linguistic communities in July 1997 and a month later held a three-day national congress in the capital to discuss national policy issues (ALMG 1997). Respected elders of the movement, such as Alfredo Tay Coyoy and Martin Chacach, chaired the work groups and encouraged local representatives to air concerns about the role of their own community languages in national policy. All agreed that the fact that Spanish remains the only official language in the country fuels discrimination against the indigenous majority. One basic goal of this commission is to achieve formal acknowledgment of the multilingual character of the nation through a listing of the country's indigenous languages in the Guatemalan constitution; another is to begin the process of standardizing a written version of each language to take the place of the many ad hoc alphabets currently in use. Participants agreed on the importance of urging government recognition of each regional language group. Yet, it is also evident that community-specific language loyalties within regions raise tricky issues for the selection of a single oral dialect to be transformed into the standard written form for each language, a necessary precursor in the view of Mayanists to a national language policy and the production of administrative and educational materials in Maya languages. Here knowledge is power in the sense that the movement looks to the expertise of professional linguists to transcend community-centrism by making scientific determinations of the most appropriate dialect. According to

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Mayanists, the choice of dialect for standardization can be made on several grounds, including which of the many dialects in a given language community incorporates the widest range of early Maya language forms, whether there is regional consensus about a high-prestige dialect, or whether it would be more effective to invent a transcendent dialect that combines features of various spoken versions. In the quest for standardization, scientific knowledge is playing a key role in the historical reconstruction of tradition and the mediation of what otherwise might be endless disputes between actual communities based on loyalty to place and ancestors. Yet, on another level, officialization is seen as an overtly political act that compels difficult choices. The most pressing issue is how many of the twenty-three languages, including non-Maya Garifuna and Xinca, need to be officialized in the practice of state politics and administration. Some activists want all languages to operate on a par with Spanish in national and regional affairs. While this might be appealing in terms of its immediate fairness, many worry that financial constraints—such as the required translation of official documents and proceedings into so many languages—would undermine any real chance that the new policy would be implemented. Others believe that a lingua franca, most likely the numerically dominant K'ichee', would be the best national choice complemented by the use of regional languages for public services, local schools, courts, and administration. There is consensus that government jobs in education, health, public administration, and the courts should be allocated to those who are fluent in regional languages, whether they are Mayas or Ladinos. This vision produces a clear indigenous alternative to Spanish as the transcendent medium for intergroup and official communication. Debates over the best model for officialization are likely to continue through the commission process and into any call for constitutional and legislative reforms. Mayanists are active in other aspects of the peace process, including the commissions on participation, land issues in indigenous communities, and the truth commission, whose work is phased in at different points during the implementation process. For instance, Otilia Lux de Coti, a prominent educator, accepted an appointment to the Commission on Historical Clarification, which in August 1997 assumed the controversial task of reconciling the de facto amnesty granted to the soldiers on both sides as part of the peace process with the pressing need urged by many organizations and citizens to document the human rights abuses during the war. At issue are ways to promote reconciliation and healing, to avoid the escalation of old conflicts into new brutality, and to dismantle the mechanisms of terror that engulfed the country for so long. With a high-profile mandate and fifty thousand complaints filed at the truth commission's inauguration, the question remains how it will operate with limited staff and government funds. Members are under enormous pressure from the popular Left to defy the limits on their

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formal mandate—which severely limits their ability to name protagonists of violence or seek prosecution of human rights violators. From the Right they are urged to document that the guerrillas were just as violent in their treatment of civilians as the army. From the Catholic Church, which has gathered tens of thousands of personal testimonies of violence through the Project for the Recuperation of Historic Memory (REMHI), they are under pressure to respond to community needs (Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado 1997). Negotiating these political white waters will be extraordinarily challenging, as we have learned from the South African truth commission. In that instance, the legal process has revealed much about the authors of violence and the daily functioning of the state terror apparatus under apartheid. Yet, the truth commission has embittered civilian victims who in order to testify have rekindled terrifying memories of abuse only to be denied the concrete personal support they anticipated. In addition to their participation on commissions, Mayanist organizations (such as CEDIM and COCADI) and popular organizations (such as the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation) have directed their energies toward rights education. Foreigners, including Europeans, Latin Americans, and North Americans, have worked through the United Nations Mission for the Verification of the Peace Accords (MINUGUA) to teach community groups about their identities and rights as recognized by the accords. MINUGUA also works to verify cases of discrimination with respect to cultural, political, and civil rights. They have also supported research on Maya customary law and programs for bilingual legal translators to assist Mayas in court proceedings. Given the rocky history of recent constitutional reforms, the limited numbers of Mayas in Congress, the absence of governmental norms for local consultation, and the chronic lack of budgetary support to enact legislation, however, serious problems remain concerning the implementation and verification of peace-process reforms.13 The movement is working to widen its public appeal and put pressure the government through publications such as the Mayanist newspaper Iximulew, a bimonthly supplement in Siglo Veintiuno newspapers, which offers news reports, interviews, and editorials on civic and political participation, the impact of the accords, Maya involvements in the construction of peace, Maya women, Maya and Ladino debates on the significance of their respective identities, language issues, and constitutional reform. With the identity accords, Cojti Cuxil and other leaders pressed on with the task of explaining the Mayanist vision of rights as a remedy for ethnic discrimination: Almost all the constitutions of Guatemala . . . have established norms which state that all people "should be treated as human beings, should not be discriminated

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against for any reason," "all human beings are free and equal in dignity before the law," and "discrimination is totally prohibited for reasons of race, religion, sex, origin, or nationality," etc. These norms are excellent when individual rights are discussed . . . but discriminatory when collective rights are treated specifically in terms of ethnic group or community. By dealing with them as equal, community differences are ignored or absorbed. Ethnic discrimination consists of not recognizing, respecting, and promoting the cultural differences that indigenous communities present in all areas: religion, linguistics, organization, economics, politics, etc. Discrimination is created by disqualifying and inferiorizing people and then by blocking, persecuting, and eliminating indigenous issues and indigenes. . . . But this should change. Thus, in the Indigenous Accord, among the government's obligations is to present to the legislature a plan for standardizing ethnic discrimination as a crime. (El Periodico Nov. 13, 1996) Like the U.S. civil rights struggles in the 1960s, many of the Guatemalan reforms outlined in the indigenous accords are highly controversial. To be successful the accords will have to generate legal reforms, institutional change, wider indigenous representation in national life, and more effective legal means for settling conflicting interests. Such accomplishments will require coalition-building among the existing political parties. Political parties, such as Rios Montt's rightist party, the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), are well-practiced in the art of politically derailing reforms. Former URNG guerrillas have moved ahead to create their own party—in addition to the popular Left's New Guatemala Democratic Front (FDNG)—one that may or may not focus on the revolutionary Left's historic concern with class-based politics at the expense of the new indigenous agenda. Work will also have to be done to convince nonindigenous Guatemalans that these reforms will benefit the country as a whole. Finally, the funding of cultural reforms will be a controversial issue in a neo-liberal climate where the government is cutting jobs and privatizing government functions and where some economists anticipate that the economy is heading for a recession and others note that, despite robust national economic growth, low inflation, and exchange rate stability in 1997, the purchasing power of the working classes was seriously compromised by rising transportation costs, stagnant employment, and eroding public services (MINUGUA 1998). Some organizations, such as MINUGUA, have reoriented their attention to monitoring the socioeconomic accords, which will also prove highly controversial in their implementation, especially as they are seen to "universally" affect citizens. Apparently, despite years of effort, the Pan-Maya movement has yet to convince Guatemalans that racism is an issue that affects all citizens. The first eight months of the implementation process did not focus on indigenous issues. Rather, national priorities concentrated on the more urgent

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tasks of dismantling civil patrols, disarming and reintegrating the guerrilla combatants, downsizing the army, and removing land mines from the countryside. Attention has turned to the problems faced by internal and international refugees—many of whom find their families dispersed and their homes and lands occupied by others. The cause celebre for grassroots activism has been to challenge what many perceive to be a dangerously comprehensive amnesty program, the impunity enjoyed by those in power given a weak judicial system, and the need to have an effective truth commission. Community involvement in teacher selection in local schools has proven to be highly controversial, given the resistance of teacher unions. Land issues have also been highly politicized. Clearly the changes advocated in the accords will create new dilemmas and provoke organized political resistance along many fronts. By 1997 Mayanist leaders found themselves active in a wider range of organizations and political settings than ever before. Within Saqb'ichil/COPMAGUA and the indigenous accord commissions, consensus decision-making and community consultation have been incorporated as Maya models of democratic participation. Important decisions on controversial issues have come from these bodies. Funders (such as U.S.-AID, which had been quite critical of Pan-Mayanism) have responded with renewed educational initiatives, including four hundred college scholarships for Mayas studying bilingual education and legal interpreting. Yet there have also been mismatches between peace-accord organizations and international funders. The fast-paced time table for accord implementation disadvantages groups that are not centrally organized and already decisive about their immediate goals. International funders (such as the World Bank, which has earmarked $1.9 billion for democratization initiatives in Guatemala) have sometimes found Maya group process illusive and hard to fathom because it does not conform to the organizational discipline expected of participants in transnational development networks. Funders on this scale appear not to be interested in peace implementation as a coalitional group process in which discussions and consultations raise important debates, group membership is fluid, and the mechanisms for reaching authoritative decisions situationally dependent. Many observers agree that the "best-organized groups" with clear-cut agendas, concrete projects, and track records of working with outside experts to generate concrete proposals have made the most headway and reaped the greatest rewards in the implementation process. Thus, while individual PanMaya and popular organizations with Maya-identified agendas have been highly successful in gaining support for their own efforts, especially with educational and community-focused projects, the coalition of representatives of politically diverse Maya organizations created through the accord process appears to have played less of a role than groups working in other areas of the accord process.

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Without the Mayanist movement, the peace-process reforms might have remained little more than a political gesture in the negotiation process, an opportunity for the guerrillas to show they could be responsive to Maya civilians and activists in the popular movement, and for the government to appear inclusive and universalistic to the international community. With a decade of organizational experience and their own effective ties to international donors, the European Union, UNICEF, and the UN, however, PanMay anists have already begun projects that flow from the indigenous accords. They are working most actively to promote Maya schools as forums through which children might gain education supportive of indigenous culture and language. Additionally, they continue to publish a wide variety of educational texts for the schools and scholarship on indigenous issues, and to press for legal recognition of indigenous customary norms and the authority of elders in rural communities. Currently, Mayanist leaders are advising the government on strategies for decentralization that, consonant with neoliberal reforms, would allow decision-making powers to devolve regionally and locally. Here is where Mayanists hope to reintroduce the issue of autonomy, which was lost in the accord process. Demetrio Cojti Cuxil argues: Isn't it possible to conceive of Guatemala as a free association of Maya and mestizo communities which undertake common objectives but preserve their respective integrity and identity? Mayanists consider this federal form of political organization an ideal that is still not feasible, and therefore accept the location of their project for national liberation within the framework of the pyramidal State. . . . In this model, the ethnic diversity and autonomy of each ethnic group would not be complete, but would function at the intermediate level of government. Autonomous regions or microregions would be formed from counties [municipios] composed of the speakers of the same language. (Cojti Cuxil, in Siglo Veintiuno, Feb. 16, 1995) There can be no other choice than that the central state apparatus carries out the supraethnic functions that concern all individual and collective members of society (such as national defense, diplomatic relations, common standards), while the particular ethnic region could and should exercise administrative and legislative powers in areas that directly affect its existence and well being (education, culture, social work, police, health, etc.). (Cojti Cuxil, in Siglo Veintiuno, Aug. 28, 1994) Officially, the government is committed to legislative and institutional change to create the new multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual vision of Guatemala in the years 1998-2000.14 It is estimated that the implementation of peace in Guatemala will cost $953 million, with the indigenous accords requiring about $88 million, of which $60 million, almost 70 percent, will need to go to educational reform (Colmenares 1997, 31). Clearly, indigenous groups did not wait for the official phasing in of the accords; rather, they began networking internationally and organizing locally in the mid 1990s to pursue their agenda for peace and a more inclusive national society.

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Defining Common Purpose across Cleavages The peace process has demonstrated that the divide between the Pan-Maya and popular movements, which some commentators have portrayed as unbreachable or irreconcilable because of ideological or class differences, is, in fact, bridged quite frequently by individuals who are active in both camps or who borrow ideas from other groups for their own uses. Thus, in practice there are many instances of cross-fertilization and frequent moments of common purpose between the movements. In responding to popular critiques, Mayanists have sharpened their class analysis. They see Ladino poverty as an important issue that needs to be addressed, and they recognize that the racism of the Ladino underclass is economically fueled. In their reflections on the multiple meanings of racism, they have drawn on Ladino scholars such as Carlos Guzman Bockler and Jean-Loup Herbert (1995) who used "internal colonialism" to conceptualize domination and discussed the unstable nature of Ladino identity.15 They also have turned recently to Marta Elena Casaus Arzu's (1992) powerful social history of Guatemala's oligarchy. Of special interest is her lineage-by-lineage documentation of the reproduction since the sixteenth century of Guatemala's microelite through class endogamy, marriage alliances between lineages that controlled vast private resources and public powers, and the racist ideology of "blood purity" (limpieza de sangre). In fact, many of these elite lineages see themselves as whites who stand totally apart from and above the indigenous/Ladino divide; none regard themselves as having indigenous blood. These lineages have historically controlled banking, commerce, government, the Catholic church, and high culture in Guatemala. For their part, many intellectuals on the Left have changed their views on indigenous issues over the years and moved away from total assimilation as the only future for indigenous communities.16 Mayanists have long admired the courageous work of popular human rights activists who publicized human rights abuses at great risk to themselves. They certainly agreed on the importance of demilitarizing civilian life and disbanding civil patrols, which functioned as prime movers in the government's counterinsurgency policy and which parents feared would socialize their sons into violence, corruption, and disrespect for the moral authority of their families. There have been other important experiments—some more promising than others—in institution building across the Pan-Mayanist/p